USTR Pushing for Australian DMCA?
According to this News.com.au article, the United States Trade Representative has raised the issue of influencing Australian copyright law to conform to the United States' Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The article mentions the provisions in the DMCA at 17 U.S.C. sect. 512, which give Internet Service Providers safe harbor from suit for users' copyright infringement only if they block access to apparent infringers. Those provisions also give copyright holders the power to subpoena the ISP and order it to identify customers that copyright holders suspect have infringed copyright with practically no judicial review. See 17 U.S.C. sect. 512(h); RIAA v. Verizon Internet Services (D.D.C. 2003) (Verizon must respond to RIAA's subpoena and identify a Kazaa user that RIAA claims downloaded several hundred copyrighted songs in one day); Donna Wentworth's Copyfight entry on the topic.
1998 amendments to Australia's Copyright Act protect ISPs from suit for customer infringement without any parallel safe harbor requirements.
I wonder what other DMCA-like provisions they'll push for. Does Australia have an equivalent to 17 U.S.C. sect. 1201's anti-circumvention provisions? Will that can of worms be on the table, too?
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