Australia's Attorney General Ignores All Evidence And Experts: Decides To Obey Hollywood's Commands On Copyright

We kind of expected this to happen, but after a long process in which the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) carefully reviewed all sorts of proposals and evidence on copyright reform, and released some sensible proposals, Australia's Attorney General (who is also its Arts Minister apparently), George Brandis, has ignored all of it, preferring to only listen to a Hollywood front group, leading him to push for a three strikes plan and censorship in an attempt to "protect" Hollywood. He does this, even though some of the best research on how terribly ineffective three strikes programs have been comes from Australian scholar Rebecca Giblin. In other words, despite lots of careful research by independent parties, and plenty of scholarly work to inform the debate, Brandis has decided to ignore all of it, and go with what the MPAA is telling him to do -- and yes, the "Australian Screen Association" is actually run by folks in Hollywood (though it changed its name from AFACT to ASA to try to hide that). For years, our biggest complaint with copyright policies is the fact that so much of it is entirely faith-based. The movie and recording industries go on big emotional pleas about how "piracy" is destroying their industries (despite record output), and insist that the reason is piracy -- ignoring tons of evidence that this is not the case. There is no doubt that these industries are facing serious transitions, but time and time again, we've seen that those who embrace the transition and (here's the key part) provide more of what the public wants in a convenient fashion tend to do better than they did before. At the same time, merely ratcheting up enforcement and censorship creates massive unintended consequences and little actual benefit for the industries who push for those policies. Australia's decision to cave to Hollywood on this will be cheered as a victory by the MPAA and its various supporters, but it's a massive loss for everyone. Promoting censorship along with anti-innovation and anti-consumer policies are no way to embrace the future. Permalink | Comments | Email This Story