USTR Pushing for Australian DMCA?

| | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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?

Categories

0 TrackBacks

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: USTR Pushing for Australian DMCA?.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.tph-lex.com/cgi-bin/mt-mcfp-tb.cgi/64

About

tph is Tim Hadley. (details) You can e-mail me at tph at tph (hyphen) lex dotcom. All times are U.S. Mountain Time (GMT -07:00).
Sometimes I write about the law, or things related to the law. Please remember that materials on this site are not offered as legal advice. Do not attempt to substitute any material or information on this site for the advice of competent counsel licensed to practice law in your jurisdiction. For more on that point, check out What this site is not. Opinions expressed on this website are my own and should not be imputed to employers, colleagues, or anyone else. Heck, opinions expressed on this website might not even be mine.

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by tph published on January 28, 2003 10:14 AM.

The Blawgistan Times Comes to Life was the previous entry in this blog.

Ramblings on The Idea of RIAA v. John and Jane Filesharer is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Powered by Movable Type 4.1