Anthony Healy

He is the director of Australasian Performing Right Association, and this is what he says about his view on Section 92A after being accused of seeking special treatment from the law to protect their own interests:

"Absolute nonsense. Without the content industries, the internet would be empty. We want to ensure that the people who make the content are rewarded.'' (full article is here)

This is just typical lobbying with falsified facts, or what Professor Lessig refers to as tobacco science. I mean, who the hell he thinks he is? The Internet would be empty if all paid content is gone? I don't even think a 3-year old would believe that. He needs to understand one thing: not every single person wants to be rewarded by money. As long as that assumption is true, then the Internet will NEVER be empty because money is off the table. Actually it is a lot better if money is off the table when it comes to journalism because then we can develop more trust on the independence of the content, at least we won't have to constantly worry if the author says certain things because of their own thoughts or they have been paid for. If Anthony is talking about other media format like music or video, I wonder if he has EVER watched anything from YouTube at all. Look at the top 10 most viewed videos, how many of them are made by people intent to be rewarded financially?

Heard of user-generated content or Web 2.0? No? What about blogging and twittering? I guess he is absolutely nonsense.

Section 92A

According to the newspaper, a new re-worked draft of Section 92A as part of the Copyright Amendment Act 2008 is returning. Without a doubt that the new draft has bits that are significantly better than the old one, like the introduction of a third party Copyright Tribunal to handle the infringement allegation between copyright holders and ISPs; and also the possibility of imposing fine instead of disconnection to the accused ones etc. But why were we opposing Section 92A in the first place - was it only because of the details of the implementation of the law?

Without repeating what a lot of people have said and debated already regarding how copyright has been misused to attack online sharing, I recommend policymakers of this country to watch this presentation from Professor Lessig which was given last year here in New Zealand. Then try to answer this question raised by him: why do we want to criminalize our children for what they do normally online (which we did the exact same thing offline before the Internet comes along)?