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posted by mrpg on Friday October 19 2018, @12:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'd-steal-a-car-and-a-DVD dept.

The Australian Communications Minister is proposing "game changing" laws crack down on Piracy by forcing search engines such as Google to filter content results thereby removing the path people have to finding illegal content online.

[...] Under the proposed laws to be introduced to Parliament today, authorities will also be able to force search engines like Google to stop "unashamedly facilitating crime" by promoting pirate sites that allow internet users to illegally download music or films.

Graham Burke, chief executive of Australian film company Village Roadshow, last night hailed the new laws as game-changing for the industry while slamming Google for acting "as evil as Big Tobacco" in its online behaviour.

"We stand ready to be co-operative with Google. We see good Google and bad Google. But bad Google is as evil as Big Tobacco was 30 years ago. They know what they're doing. They know they're facilitating and enabling crime and it's time for them to clean their act up," he told News Corp.

He accused Google of "unashamedly facilitating crime" by taking people to criminal pirate websites.

Does the Australian government really need to give weapons to special interest groups to enforce civil laws the majority of people do not support?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 19 2018, @03:36PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday October 19 2018, @03:36PM (#750961) Journal

    I agree that creators deserve compensation for creating works of value. What I don't agree with is copyright as the means and vehicle for determining the value and achieving the compensation.

    Copyright has been corrupted-- stories of artists being screwed by publishers are everywhere. Researchers get screwed even worse. It's changing, but it is still mostly a bad deal in which in exchange for being published, they are asked to turn over all rights to the publisher. The academic publisher can and often does paywall all the works. They pay the authors nothing. They don't pay for the research either, the public is often the one who foots such costs in the form of grants. Nor do they do the work of reviewing the findings, they farm that out to the authors' peers.

    Another corruption everyone is well aware of is the extreme length of copyright terms. This is one of the many issues in which over 90% of the public agrees: copyright lasts too long.

    But even if copyright had not been warped, it would still be a bad system. I very much resent that resources we spend for law enforcement should be used to chase after alleged pirates. Worse than that though is that we are forced to not use our technology. To use a car analogy, it's like the speed limit everywhere is 10 kph when everyone knows cars can go 10 times as fast, with safety levels that the public finds acceptable. In particular, our public libraries should be allowed to go all digital. And entire bookshelf worth of books can fit on one flash drive. There would be no need to trek to the library, twice, once to pick up a physical copy and once more to return it, when everything can be downloaded. Libraries could have everything, instead of the tiny selection of works they are limited to thanks to being forced to stick to bulky physical media. No more late fines. No more lost media. And all that space that's currently used to store things could be repurposed. And most of all, everything would be way, way more searchable.

    Think of it. Today, you can hop online and track down scans of the works of many famous scientists from the 19th century and earlier. I wanted to take a look at some of Euler's papers (Euler was one of the most famous mathematicians of the 18th century) and was able to track them down, online, in a few minutes. One problem I ran into was that Euler wrote his papers in Latin. However, scholars have translated many of his works into English, and made the translations freely available online. I could download the Latin original and the English translation, and had them side by side so I could compare, make absolutely sure that I had it right. There was no way that could have been done in the 1980s. For one, the translations hadn't been done yet, and that's probably because the originals hadn't been scanned then. You would have had to get permission to view such valuable originals from whichever library has them, and likely travel there, as they sure wouldn't do an interlibrary loan for that. Could have taken weeks. The Internet cut that time to minutes. We can have that with centuries old science, but we can't have it with modern science, we can only have a half assed partial access, thanks to the insanity around copyright.

    An oft asked question is "how will artists make any money without copyright?" as if copyright is the only way to compensate artists. The "starving artists" wail was a great tearjerker, but it's really tired now. And that question has been answered. The answer is various forms of patronage. Patronage worked for Mozart and Beethoven, it's not new. And today, we can do patronage so much better, have the public directly involved through platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, no need for rich nobility. That's where we should spend our efforts, on improving that. Ramp up the digitization efforts, make more and better digital notary services to keep plagiarism to a minimum, and making public patronage better and better.

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