Australian copyright reform; or, the Creation of Sensible Legislation.

14 May 2006

SMH Article: Cutting crime as easy as MP3

Woot. The best bit:

Schools, universities, libraries and other cultural institutions will in the future be free to use copyright material for non-commercial purposes.

Dubious bit:

In a big win for recording artists, the laws will include the removal of the legislative 1 per cent cap on copyright licence fees paid by radio broadcasters for playing sound recordings.

Dubious because I’m really uncertain as to how that’s going to pan out… I’m thinking it’s actually going to further inhibit the scope of the music we hear on commercial radio! Non-commercial radio… well, who knows? Is that a “cultural institution”?

We’ll see how it pans out. I’m now keen on getting an MP3 player/phone that plays MP3s (and has at least 512MB on an SD card, none of this super-tiny-memory stuff you find in phones). Orange stop operations at the beginning of August, I think, so I’ve got until then…