Crazy TV rules...
But wouldnt it then be illegal to watch terrestrial tv during troppo.
You may remember last year when Victoria wasnt allowed to watch Underbelly but due to ducting people in coastal Victoria got to watch Underbelly through WIN from its Mt Barrow Northern Tasmania transmitter.
Gee people in Albury / Wodonga would have to arrest themselves if they watched the other state's commercial tv.
The major difference is that the terrestrial signals are not encrypted, therefore there is no legal breach compared to Aurora if persons are unlawfully decrypting encrypted transmissions.Originally Posted by dryfry
In the instance of Underbelly, it was the program content itself that was embargoed, not the transmission.
The same restriction applied to Victorians purchasing/watching the DVD of the series at the time.
Laws are proclamations - made, changed and broken by politicians.
Good law is a blessing, an asset, an adornment on society.
Bad law is an embarrassment, a nuisance or a curse: like a running sore.
Like their laws, politicians come and go. Some are like roses, others like farts. Dogs promote themselves by leaving their mark on the side of buildings and statues. So do politicians.
The difference between a law and a guideline is not whether it's wise, sensible, helpful or beneficial to society. It's whether a penalty has been deemed by politicians to be payable for their violation. Just as churches rank sins in order of seriousness, so do politicians and hence the courts rank violations as misdemeanors, contraventions, offences, felonies and crimes. Like sport, it's a game with rules and penalties.
There's nothing absolute about law, any more than one sport is absolutely superior to another. It's all relative to dates, jurisdictions, whether a crime is witnessed, what evidence was gathered, how it was prosecuted, who tried it, whether a defence was afforded, and perhaps what political machinations were at play behind the scenes.
To know whether something is illegal for sure you need to pay a lawyer, who will ask you which state you live in, check what date it is, review his books, review his journals of recent case law, check with his colleagues, then give you his opinion and ask you to sign a disclaimer.
To know if something is ethical you could ask a philosopher or a priest. You could search the ancient scrolls. You could check with your wife. Or you could "search your feelings, you know it to be true."
Most of us though have neither the time nor the money to afford any of these. We live the way we were raised, we do cost-benefit analyses, we follow our consciences, we hear about new laws on breakfast television, we put our foot on the brake when we see a speed camera, and we keep our head down when police are around. Because fundamentally we know that the law is not about right and wrong, it's about power and how it's wielded.
If you hurt someone you may or may not get caught, and if you are then you can expect consequences. But for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which being bad law, people sometimes suffer consequences even when they weren't hurting anyone. Watching interstate television on your gold card hurts nobody - except if you watch something controversial and gossip about it in a way that prejudices somebody's trial. People get prejudiced through TV all the time because of lazy reporting, derogatory jokes or stereotypical drama. All that's different with Underbelly is it involved a court case, which magically made it a sacred cow. To most of us it seems an absurd distinction, but if you ask someone who's innocent and trying to get a fair trial though he'll tell you that media coverage matters. And it does, unfortunately.
Aurora is encryped! If it wasnt you wouldnt need a card/keys!
It is also not FTA, for the same reason.
Best analogy on politicians and their doings I've read, unfortunately when they go the idiot laws they've made remain, unlike the urine stain on the side of the building.
Some have suggested that all laws should be re-examined every 10 years to see if they are still relevant, unfortunately I see this as a means by which politicians could remove laws that have shown over time to be detrimental to their own self interest.
Did i say it wasn't?
you tell me?
a great example. Just this week, riot police stormed a man's 30th birthday barbecue for 15 guests because it was advertised as an "all-night" party on Facebook. Four police cars, eight officers in camouflage trousers and body armour, several plain-clothes officers, a riot van, and a force helicopter were all dispatched to a privately-owned field in a small UK village, ordering the party shut down or everyone would be arrested. The BBQ had only been going for an hour before it was busted up at 4pm - the music hadn't even been plugged in. The police refused to believe it was just a small BBQ, insisting it was an all-night rave because the event description on facebook mentioned 'overnight' in case people wanted to sleep over.Bad law is an embarrassment, a nuisance or a curse: like a running sore.
No, it's not a joke: the , as did .
It's based on brought in 15 years ago in knee-jerk reaction to raves, basically criminalising them even when held on legal ground. It gives police power to disperse any gathering of 2 or more people if the police think they're preparing a rave, or 10 or more people if the police think they're waiting for a rave.
No evidence, no courts, no right to appeal.
The police haven't backed down and acknowledged it as a mistake - they still believe that anything advertised on the Internet as an "all-night party" should be illegal. It amounts to a curfew, telling people when bed time is.
It reminds me of the at this year's Falls Music Festival on Tasmania's east coast. Some clever dick decided it would be a good idea to breathalise everyone leaving the event, to "get tough" on drink driving. Trouble was they only had a handful of police on hand. But rather than abandon the order as impractical they simply made everyone queue and wait - some for ! Many tourists missed their flights and were left out of pocket. The event's reputation was trashed and Tasmanian tourism generally suffered. It was an utter P.R. disaster. But, true to form, the police and failed to acknowledge that the massive public inconvenience was entirely their fault. This wasn't bad law but bad law enforcement: they failed to adapt to circumstances on the ground (inadequate manpower), dug their heels in and held above the public interest.
Bad policy + unaccountable lawmakers + unrepentant law enforcers =
Last edited by gw1; 19-07-09 at 10:49 AM.
The March '04 Digital Agenda amendment.
It is not legal to circumvent a technological circumvention protection measure in Australia,
which is what the methods to bypass the normal delivery of the TV service are.
It is not legal to even write a program that is designed to circumvent a technological protection measure.
Art.
enf (22-07-09)
looks like I have to stay off bit torrent and buy all my software now.
I defer to Art......
Cheers
enf
The fact that there's a highway to hell and a stairway to heaven says a lot about the anticipated traffic flow.
There have been some changes since then I think, though I'm not up with all the details. Last time I looked everything was being reworked in aftermath of Howard's 2005 AUSFTA agreement which basically committed us to comply with America's demands by January 2007. The 2003-2004 Digital Agenda Act reforms Art refers to arose from the Phillips Fox review, whose recommendations were substantially knocked on the head by government on the basis that AUSFTA had sweeping scope and all bets were off until the dust cleared.
So far as circumvention goes, at least back then, the law made distinction between copyright protection and region protection. Lobbyists to get the distinction removed but . Consequently those who use Aurora goldies are in the same league as "offenders" who use region-free DVD players to watch overseas movies they bring back from holiday or buy on ebay. Both involve circumvention. But it's circumvention of a different kind to the copyright provisions utilised by Pay TV companies.
As 2006 review article put it, "the free trade deal that Australia signed with the US in 2004 requires Australia to implement a liability scheme to deter people from overriding the TPMs that copyright owners place on electronic copyright material to stop it from being copied or accessed. Anyone who makes or sells devices that circumvent these so-called technological protection measures (TPMs) could face up to five years in jail and a fine of $60500. The government plans to tighten up the law by banning the use of circumvention devices, as well as their sale and distribution. The amendments toughen up protection in this area and tip the copyright balance in favour of copyright owners. They also allow punitive damages for flagrant acts of circumvention; at the moment these are only available for copyright infringement and not for circumvention of a TPM attached to a copyright work. But the government says the tough new measures will not apply to TPMs solely designed for other purposes, such as market segmentation through region coding, or to deter competition in aftermarket goods, such as spare parts, where the TPM does not have a connection with copyright."
I'm pretty sure the new post-AUSFTA (cited by Beer4life) formed the basis of Foxtel's action against the in 2007.
Laws are only meaningful when prosecuted. The relevant fact is that Foxtel and Austar don't care about you watching Region 1 DVDs or interstate FTA, but they do care about you watching Jerry Springer, America's Top Model or Wrestlemania without payment. They co-opt police to conduct searches and it's only there that rubber hits the road. When Austar led the police through my home last year and police spotted my Aurora goldie I told them it was for receiving interstate FTA (and showed them!) and they made clear they had no interest in that. That's the way the law works. Those with power to influence politicians get laws written to protect their interests and police assigned to enforce them.
It's difficult to imagine anyone being prosecuted for decoding interstate FTA via an Aurora goldie or other emulator, at the present time at least. But if a Pay TV company raids you for some reason and finds no evidence to use against you apart from an Aurora wafer, you can bet they'll try to make a big deal of it, because bluffing and intimidation is how they get confessions (and most convictions are secured through confession). So if that happens to you then : say . If you're the ballsy type then give them the finger and say "charge me or let me go, I'm saying nothing". Otherwise sit tight and .
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evyS0colujs"]Give 'em the finger[/ame]
Lie and Deny.......the best initial response usually....
Cheers
enf
The fact that there's a highway to hell and a stairway to heaven says a lot about the anticipated traffic flow.
Don't worry, A law such as this would never be introduced into Australia.
except maybe in Qld?...
Any law that prohibited 2 or more people gathering to rave would cause the immediate closure of Parliament house Canberra.
That's not quite right - Australian law specifically grants the right to import DVDs for personal use.
It's the DVD players that enforce region coding that infringe upon our rights. That said, most manufacturers immediately dropped region coding on players sold in Australia when the ACCC began investigating the matter years ago.
Shame it all came back in with Blu-ray though...
Yes, you're right, but region-lock systems (whether on DVDs, games or whatever) are encryption-based content controls used by publishers and copyright holders which is why the law has needed to distinguish between them and systems aimed at combatting piracy.
As legal reviews have found, and as Sony's efforts have demonstrated (first with modchip litigation then with Blu-ray) the content owners have always been pushing for greater control at the expense of customers - financial or freedom.
I'm not saying that playing out-of-region DVDs is illegal - thank god it's not. But if it wasn't for distinctions in law it would have been. Those same distinctions, it could be argued, work in favour of those viewing out-of-state FTA via Aurora. Why? Because the purpose of Aurora's encryption is not for royalty recovery but to enforce distribution regions, as is the case with DVD region locking. That's just my opinion though obviously. It's precisely because of the legal ambiguity in these emerging cases that the succession of reviews and amendments has been necessary. The Phillips Fox report recommended a number of changes to clarify and tighten the law in certain places but by and large, at that time, the government stuck with the status quo and said the present system (where complainants had to make their case in court) was working adequately and they didn't want to further restrict consumer rights in the areas cited. A bunch of the submissions to the Phillips Fox review were confidential ones from providers!
Last edited by gw1; 22-07-09 at 08:21 PM.
36 posts to answer this question
Are Aurora access cards illegal??
And it’s so easy to answer with this question. Did you pay for a card ?
if you answer Yes. then the answer is no
if you answer No. then the answer is yes
gee that was hard
I can't vouch for games, but I can tell you DVD region coding is nothing more than a 7-bit flag on the disc that specifies the combination of regions the disc is for (eg many Warner discs have a flag of 0101000 which permits both region 2 and region 4) - nothing more. The encryption of the DVD is completely separate from, and entirely unrelated to, the region code.
I haven't fully delved into the structure of Blu-ray so can't vouch that its region coding system works the same way. That said, the majority of Blu-rays don't have a region code set (and HD-DVD didn't even use a region coding system) - it's really only 20th Century Fox that is still anal about region locking their discs (which therefore means that Blu-rays they still haven't released a couple of years later in Australia I can't import because their region code will infringe upon my legal right to bring the disc over, doh!).
I no nothing of AUS law but I know this.
If your watching a channel that your not meant to be watching your in the Illegal act of
"Theft of Programs and or Services on an encrypted network"
Thats my opinion and Ive seen it applied over in the UK. But this is Australia. I no nothing ATM but Im here to learn...
Actually my non-lawyer understanding is that is illegal for the broadcasters to transmit a signal to an area which is not permitted under the ACMA rules.
The "illegal" part is not in the reception, but in the transmission. Otherwise every person who lived in Wodonga was breaking the law by watching that tv series about the Melb underworld.
* Bill Paxton is the only actor to be killed by Alien, a Terminator, and the Predator.
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