A new law goes into effect on Sunday in Australia that is remarkably similar to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States. It's called the Digital Agenda Bill and it basically outlaws the supply, manufacture, and importation of "circumvention devices" in much the same way as the DMCA.

As a direct result of this new legislation, members of 2600 Australia have decided to remove all copies of DeCSS from their servers. What follows is a public letter which explains their decision.

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Hi everybody,

Just prior to midnight this Sunday I will be removing DeCSS and other pieces of software that might put me personally in the position of breaking the Australian Copyright Act (Digital Agenda Bill), 2000, which goes into affect on Sunday.

Ref: Digital Agenda Bill, 2000

Ref: Whole Copyright Act, 1968

As you probably well know, this law broadly and fairly effectively outlaws the supply, manufacture, marketing, importation (but not use) of "circumvention devices" as well as a range of other things. Check the first link above if you'd like to refresh your memory about how extensive the list is. All legal advice that I have received from fairly well informed parites tends to suggest that despite the existence of substantial non-infringing uses for DeCSS and related software in the decryption and immediate display of encrypted content such as that provided on commercial DVDs.

I say "fairly effectively" because it prevents "marketing" as well. It's drawing a bit of a long bow, but it seems that linking to DeCSS in the context of describing how to use it or other software for the purpose of "circumventing" technical protections on things also invites bad juju.

Bad juju, legally speaking, is something that I have neither the time, money nor resolve to take on personally. As 2600 Australia is neither a business nor a registered organisation we cannot fight this on legal grounds. 2600 Australia does not enjoy any form of protected speech such as that which 2600 in the USA is mounting a defence / an appeal in proceedings against it in the United States. Australia also does not have any online freedom organisations such as EFF to assist in putting forward the proposition that DeCSS and other related software is a valid, legal thing to have. EFA, although fighting for various other causes, is simply not well-enough resourced to join in this now-apparently-lost battle.

Instead of just removing the DeCSS and related software and forgetting this ever happened, I will instead be publishing some statistics about how many copies of DeCSS were distributed prior to this legislation coming into effect. I suspect the numbers will be substantial.

If anyone wishes to criticise me or 2600 Australia for "giving up" on this issue, I'd ask that they consider these issues:

1) A substantial number of copies are already in the hands of ordinary users, whether or not they know how to use the software at the present time.

2) The software is very readily available on overseas websites. The lack of understanding that Governments have about the Internet and how it radically alters distribution models, business models and even enforcement of various laws cannot be more clearly seen than with the Digital Agenda Bill. The ease with which legislators bowed to pressure from well-funded lobbyists from IP industries such as the music and motion picture industries is also depressing.

3) Very few organisations stood up to be counted when faced with this law. It wasn't an easy situation to explain to a local member more accustomed to dealing with residents complaining about traffic lights and street rubbish, I'll concede, but the mere threat of being branded a pirate by a shill like Jack Valenti of the MPAA when compared to selling out in the short term and buying a cartel-built DVD player was just too great to bother not giving in and just buying a player. The effects of this law will not be felt for some years to come. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission seems to finally be realising the problem with artificial restrictions on competition such as region encoding. Lets hope they stumble onto the DVD player competition situation in the course of their region encoding investigation.

Finally, I'd warn commentators that will inevitably try and deal with this issue again in a week or so (there was some comment today in SMH and Australian IT) that this issue cannot be compared to the plight of Napster. One audience downloads content at zero cost to them (even if only to sample it) - the other buys their content from a regular store at full price and just wants to watch what they have paid for on a player of their choice and using whatever computer operating system they choose. BIG difference.

Grant

2600 Australia