http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/14/australia_copyright_scheme/ "After taking the prize of internet villain of the year for worst internet blocking proposal on the planet, the Australian Government appears determined to do the double, with what has already been described as the world?s worst (communication) interception scheme. This time, the issue is copyright protection, as the government touts proposals to get all Australian ISP?s to spy on their citizens in order to monitor for copyright compliance." Our government is insane. Having said that, it makes it clear who is pushing copyright protection and who it is designed to protect.. And a win here in a supposedly moderate, first world nation will merely be a test case for what other countires they can take this level of control. The other part of this story is that the whole net filtering scheme was censorship designed to 'protect the children' from unpleasant things on the net (dear lord, I thought that's what parents were for) - and while we in Oz were told the 'black list' of sites was supposedly related to child pr0n, this has proved not to be the case. Not that we're allowed to know that, as the black list is not permitted to be known by any of our population (a case of 'we'll take care of you citizen now go back to sleeeep' ) - and worse still - yes, it can be worse, the implementation of this nonsense isn't to be by a government body, the monitoring, blacklisting and censoring is to be carried out by a PRIVATE company! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/07/oz_link_ban/ "not only (does) the blacklist targets a wider range of material than child abuse .. the lines between art, obscenity and political speech are not as bright and clear as politicians would have us imagine."
