Why deny US-style Fair Use copyright laws to Australians?; Sydney Morning Herald, 2/19/14

Adam Turner, Sydney Morning Herald; Why deny US-style Fair Use copyright laws to Australians? :

"Why did we gain the restrictions of US copyright law but not the rights?...

After an 18-month review, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has backed calls to bring Australia's copyright laws into the modern age with "Fair Use" exemptions. The change would streamline our current hotch-potch copyright laws, which aren't designed to cope with the rapid pace of technological change.

Australia's current copyright laws need to be rewritten to account for every new technology, an approach which saw everyone breaking the law for almost thirty years until we gained the right to record free-to-air television in 2007. The ALRC's "Copyright and the Digital Economy" report wants to replace this with proactive Fair Use laws which use four technologically-neutral "fairness factors" to determine whether an act of copying is within the law.

Federal Attorney-General George Brandis agrees that copyright laws need an overhaul, describing them as "overly long, unnecessarily complex, often comically outdated and all too often, in its administration, pointlessly bureaucratic"...

Brandis has already signalled his reluctance to embrace Fair Use law due to the supposed uncertainty it would create for copyright holders. This of course conveniently ignores the fact that the United States – one of the world's major content creators – has had similar Fair Use laws in place for decades."