Just recent, June 5th, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) posted a paper outlining changes to Australian copyright law that would replace the existing “copyright exceptions” section with a broader, more flexible, American-style Fair Use clause (zdnet article). Seeing as right now the number of countries with a Fair Use policy can be counted on one hand (Wikipedia Fair Use) this could be a good step forward for other nations.
The ALRC proposal includes several different categories for Fair Use to be judged on: “Research or study; criticism or review; parody or satire; reporting news; non-consumptive (such as caching); private and domestic; quotation; education; and public administration.” Under their current laws, cable providers offering the ability to watch any show streamed from the cloud to your television is technically against the copyright of the show holders. This new Fair Use policy would allow Australian law to better reflect the technological world we live in.
And if that wasn’t promising enough, the ALRC is taking in Australian citizens opinions in account before they make their final proposal to the rest of the government. Hopefully this law reform will go through and we can move towards a future with more friendly copyright systems for all nations.
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