[Year 12 IT Apps] Jailbreaking your iPhone and ripping DVDs:Both now perfectly legal

Thu Jul 29 14:04:48 EST 2010

When discussing these issues I always preface everything with "this is an example of what is happening in country X, the law is might be different here" So (hopefully) it's apparent to the students I'm not claiming to be an oracle on what the particular laws are for Australia. I reinforce that this is generally what is happening so they have a better idea of what the issues are and how they are sometimes resolved.

The reason I use examples from other countries is because I figure it's a good indication of how the laws might go here. This is what happened with copying music CD's which has been perfectly legal in Germany for years, providing that it wasn't being distributed to someone else. The Australian treatment of this eventually caught up.

So, to answer your question, as far as I know the change doesn't affect Australian law right now, but it could in the future.

Stuart Anderson
VCE Accounting and IT Applications teacher
Kambrya College

________________________________

From: itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au on behalf of ken price
Sent: Thu 29/07/2010 1:25 PM
To: Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Year 12 IT Apps] Jailbreaking your iPhone and ripping DVDs:Both now perfectly legal

The original article referred I think to changes in US law, which don't necessarily apply in Australia. So i guess my question extends back to Stuart also - do we know if this change affects Australian lawl?

Both issues are well worth discussion in a classroom setting, but it would be good to know the Australian legal situation from our role as teachers. At present the SmartCopying website is pretty much gospel as far as copyright is concerned, so any changes would need to reflected there. When things are unclear there is a real risk that a teacher somewhere will end up in court.

Back to the region codes - the copyright council website suggest that region codes aren't "protection measures", so Mark's statement certainly  appears to be correct:

"In many cases, DVDs are region-coded for playing only in particular countries or groups of countries. Teachers can nevertheless play the DVDs in a  multi-region player, or re-set the region coding (we understand this can sometimes be done via the remote control) or they may have the region-code control in the DVD player modified so it plays DVDs from relevant regions. " 
http://www.copyright.org.au/information/cit005/cit073/wp0042

Cheers
Ken

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 1:12 PM, ken price <kenjprice at gmail.com> wrote:

	Thanks Mark - what is the source of that information? 

	I'm interested because (so far as I am aware, and according to the SmartCopying webste) it remains illegal to bypass the protection on many commercial DVDs. 

	The reason given for it being illegal would seem to also apply to the region encoding. Different thing, but still a Technological Protection Measure I'd think.

	from http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/go/pid/529 :

	"SCHOOLS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO FORMAT SHIFT IF MAKING THE FORMAT SHIFT COPY CIRCUMVENTS AN ACCESS CONTROL TECHNOLOGICAL PROTECTION MEASURE Most commercial DVDs are protected by an access control technological protection measure <http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/Jahia/lang/en/scw/go/pid/902>  (access control TPM). Schools are not permitted to circumvent this access control TPM <http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/Jahia/lang/en/scw/go/pid/902>  to make a format shift copy (eg, by using software such as deCSS or DVD Shrink)."

	Cheers, ken 

	TASITE www.tasite.tas.edu.au <http://www.tasite.tas.edu.au/>  

	On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Mark KELLY <kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au> wrote:

		On a similar note, you should know that DVD region encoding has no support under copyright or any other law, and you are free to use any means to circumvent region limitations imposed by movie distributors.

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