Some months ago, I posted about proposed changes to copyright law that would have made life much less painful for anyone using copyrighted material in this country. I only just found out that the Attorney-General today announced legal changes as a result of that review; there’s an excellent (and detailed) summary over at LawFont.

The good news: we will finally have law that makes format-shifting legal.

The bad news: the AG chickened out. The amendment allows format-shifting and time-shifting, and provides new exceptions for libraries, schools, and people with disabilities — but beyond that, there’s nothing to help shift the balance of copyright back towards consumers and away from owners.

What’s being done is little more than the bare minimum changes proposed in the original Issues Paper! Never mind the fact that most of the submissions were strongly in favour of big changes, with widespread calls for a broad ‘fair use’ doctrine.

The opportunity for some real reform of copyright law has been blown, and instead we’ve got an amendment that panders to the big businesses who said “the sky will fall down if you allow fair use!”. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, but this is very, very disappointing.