Russell Brown reports on the return of the select committee report on the Copyright Amendement Bill.
The kinda good:
- Libraries and archives retain the right to keep digital copies, and to break DRM in order to do so.
- If a consumer wants to exercise their copy rights on a DRM’d copy (CD etc), then they no longer have to ask the copyright holder, but they still have to go and get a “qualified person” (perhaps a librarian or someone deemed qualified by the Governer General, no less) to do the deed.
- The sunset clause is gone, so we retain these excellent options forever.
The mostly bad:
- TPMs? remain protected and totally off limits from reverse engineering etc. by mere mortals.
- The bill makes it abundantly clear that copyright owners can contract out of all? the permitted acts.? I presume this would be in the form of tiny, barely legible text on a CD cover or equivalent.
This all gets a big fat meh from me.? The select committee was basically the last avenue to have any of this legilsation watered down.? So now my position reverts to the hope and belief that the entire business model behind this legislation will change.? TPMs will soon become as utterly irrelvant as buggy whips, and the proposed legislation will sit inside dusty books, never to be referred to again.
