In great news for anyone opposed to the heavy handed actions of the movie industry in attempting to prevent piracy, the High Court has ruled that iiNet has no direct power to prevent its users from downloading pirated content.

The music and movie industry had previously sued iiNet for, in effect, "authorising" illegal downloads by not preventing its users from doing so. They lost that case, appealed, and lost the appeal. They then appealed to the High Court. They have lost that and the matter is closed.

Until the government changes the law. Which they will undoubtedly do, since they are about to sign the TPP without any public discussion. The U.S. has previously bullied trade partners into changing their copyright enforcement laws to favour the U.S. movie industry. There is no doubt in my mind that they will do this again in the latest TPP round. The fact that the government is super quiet on the TPP makes me think they already know that they are going to have to sell out Australia's citizens.

The High Court decision does not mean that an ISP is immune, however. One part of the Federal Court appeal's result was that it provided a set process whereby an ISP could be held liable. The movie industry lost the appeal because the process they followed did not lead to iiNet's liability.

    [continued...]

New technology and science in crime fighting means that old crimes from 20 or 30 years ago are now being solved, mainly from DNA evidence.

One of the perhaps unexpected outcomes is that there are more elderly prisoners than before, to the point that prisons are having problems coping with them.

An example of the change is in Victoria's prison system where the number of prisoners over 50 has doubled in the last ten years, and there are more new prisoners in their 70s and 80s, which used to be a rare event.

Australia Bureau of Statistics figures show that over the last ten years the number of Australians over 50 has grown by 31%, whereas in prison it has grown by 84%.

The implications are wide: some of elderly prisoners can't use the top bunk, can't wash themselves and can't get around to do exercise without a frame. It also means that prison hospitals are increasingly being used as aged-care facilities.

We might end up like the U.S. and have special nursing home prisons. More in The Age.

Australia is "debating" changes to the law that will force ISPs and telecommunication companies to keep data on their users. I put "debating" in quotes, because the government is forcing the bills through without any sort of meaningful public input.

The bills are a disgrace. As one commentator (see link below) says, we don't accept that the government can open our letters and read them, so why should email or text messages be any different? We also haven't been told whether a history of our day-to-day browsing the Web will be kept, or for how long, or who would have access to that information.

The trouble with broad-reaching legislation is that, despite reassuring comments at first, the legislation inevitably gets used in the widest possible way, much beyond what the original intent was. For this reason alone, we should be concerned about it.

In the interests of fairness, I link to The Age's opinion piece by Robert McLelland, the Federal Attorney-General, who is replying to a previous critical piece. Make sure you read the comments to McLelland for several very good reasons why the legislation should be rejected.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about the case between film and music studios and Australia's 3rd biggest ISP, iiNet. The studios sued iiNet for not taking action against subscribers who were downloading pirated material. The studios lost the case, and then immediately appealed.

The appeal result came in yesterday, and it is another loss to the studios. However, this time it is a mixed result, with the judges split 2 to 1, and, in particular, one of the dismissing judges commenting that the situation is ongoing and the appeal result does not signal that iiNet could not be held liable in the future. In other words, a situation could arise that iiNet is held liable.

The studios are now likely to appeal to the High Court.

The case is keenly watched by all interested stakeholders: the ISP industry, the music and film studios, the Federal Government, and, perhaps surprisingly, the rest of the world.

The Government is watching because it wants a clear legal result before it decides whether to change any legislation. The rest of the world is watching because this is     [continued...]

Australian ISP iiNet has won the case brought by AFACT for facilitating piracy. The case was viewed as a landmark because the decision, no matter which way it went, would set a legal precedent for how much ISPs have to do to protect third-party rights.

There is a plethora of commentary everywhere, so I won't say more other than it is a victory for commonsense.

Executive Summary

For me, the most salient point is that of iiNet's counsel Cobden who said, "we will not take on the rights holders' outsourcing of their rights enforcement."

Finally, author Robert Heinlein's famous quote in Life-Line is a pertinent way to finish this:     [continued...]

I thought I'd share what I've found about a blog's terms and conditions, privacy, and disclaimers. I'm not a lawyer, so don't use this for your own blog.

I haven't blogged for a couple of years and I wanted to get up to date on legal issues to do with running a blog. Basically, I wanted to protect my blog from being used maliciously, protect myself from unwanted liabilities, and not get bogged down in multi-page small print disclaimers.

So I just spent a week or two idly going through google looking for ideas. Some things were immediately apparent:

1. US law still predominates any advice you might read.
2. You probably do need to have something written down for users on the terms and conditions of using a blog; you should protect yourself with a disclaimer; and in my jurisdiction I should have something on privacy as well.
3. Legal ideas have changed and some laws have been fine-tuned for the web. In general, they are still pretty unclear though.