The insanity has begun with a passion in Australia as the first day of the new Digital Agenda Act came and went. It is now technically possible to be sent to prison for forwarding an email without permission. Yes, this is reality.

"It's quite possible that the forwarding of an e-mail could be a technical infringement of copyright," said the legal advisor of Attorney-General Daryl Williams in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph. "E-mailing something is a 'communication' under the Digital Agenda Act and so is putting something up on a website."

It's called "personal copyright" and, unless explicitly stated otherwise by the author, it applies to every piece of email sent out. The maximum penalty for violating this copyright by forwarding email to someone else without permission is five years in prison or a fine of $60,000 AU (about $31,000 US) - for each violation.

The Digital Agenda Act is largely similar to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of the United States which was used to prevent 2600 from posting the source code of DeCSS, a program that decrypted DVDs.