Telstra vs the mess that is Australia’s copyright system

28 Oct 2005

In an exchange between Phil Tripp, a music media commentator, and Telstra Corporate Affairs manager Craig Middleton, it’s revealed that the record companies/distributors are just like the rest of us.

Craig Middleton said this:

No I am not saying iPod users can download directly into iTunes. But they can download and burn CDs. With a CD there is no need to ‘engineer’ anything with iTunes – although it is illegal to rip from CD onto iPod. As the Sydney Morning Herald once pointed out there is no legal way to use an iPod – but that makes a lot of us criminals
:-)

Then Phil Tripp (albeit under a pseudonym) fired this back:

And I’m one of the biggest criminals around with a succession of three generations of pods with 11,000 songs on one now and a hard drive with 26,000 songs–but all legal from my own record collection.

SO what you suggest I do is use a PC to download songs legally from BP, then burn to CD and then I can transfer these over to an iPod. KEWL! You got me. Any chance that BP is going to do the 99 cent downloads again for November if iTunes launches?

Telstra pulled out the lawyers.

Phil suggested that Telstra encourages customers to circumvent its digital rights management protections. In fact, Telstra in no way advocates or condones this type of action by customers. Transferring BigPond Music downloads from a CD to an iPod or other device is an infringement of copyright. It is also a breach of the terms and conditions that customers agree to when they sign-up to use BigPond Music. Craig made this clear in his email to Phil by saying “it is illegal to rip from CD onto iPod.”

Telstra is extremely disappointed that Phil chose to misrepresent his exchange with Craig on the themusic.com.au website.

That is, of course, assuming smiley faces have absolutely nil semantic value. Bull crap. (I try to keep this site clean, and that’s probably one of the stronger expletives I’ve used here. This debacle irks me, lots.)

Telstra, just like the rest of us, fully recognises what consumers will do with DRM’d media. Namely, whatever the hell they can and want to. No-one reads “terms of service” for B2C services, unless they’re security paranoid (I’ve been known to, but only when I really don’t trust a source–certainly not because I’m afraid of prosecution!), and distributors know it.

Record companies are a bunch of ostriches, it’s true, so maybe they’re the only ones who haven’t cottoned on to this fact yet. This whole DRM thing is a massive façade to convince the record industry they do, in fact, have some control over the distribution of their music. Here’s some news: they don’t. You probably didn’t hear it here first.