DMCA set to make Australia a Penal Colony?
DMCA is the digital management copyright act. It has been imported from the USA as part of the latest Free Trade agreement. It is not a law about making things free and easy to trade – quite the opposite. It sets the scene for primary brands to control markets and reduces the rights of developers and owners of all kinds of software and hardware.
It is combined with DRM(digital rights management) technologies to lock down software and hardware so that only their publishers have the right to interact with them. Interaction by anyone else could be called circumvention by the publisher and described as an illegal act.
I can change this?
If this is a democracy then Australian interests can define our rights.
The laws should be developed on our behalf.
Perhaps our lawmakers have become too willing to accept international recommendations uncritically.
Time for Australian consumers, developers, inventors, artists, musicians, educational institutions and businesses to identify our Digital Access Rights and bring those to any agreement which impacts on our right to innovate, communicate and trade.
Please sign the petition and talk about these issues with friends family and business partners. Make your digital rights an issue for your government representative.
http://www.linux.org.au/law/What should we ask for?
Providing right of way to manufacturers and publishers at the expense of all other members of our digital community establishes a feudal system of control over our rights to access and interact with digital information.
Free nations are built on a precept that freedom comes from sharing rights jointly with others. Not on excluding the rights of the many in the interests of the few. Digital media is a chattel, a commodity. Digital media should be something we can own and use flexibly, not something which then owns our future choices.
Digital products should not cause anomalies in our civil rights.
These tools and the content on them increasingly are becoming our means of communication with each other. Distortions of our rights on these products have dramatic implications for our cultural, community and business freedoms.
As an interesting contrast:
From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.