To be fair, no government has got it when it comes to networks and digital stuff, the DMCA probably qualifies as the mother load but Australian Governments have been staggeringly consistent in getting it wrong. Staggering is the word as they lurch from legistylative inanity to advanced technological buffonery and on, and on.
Where to start is hard enough, but if where we are now is any indication, where we will end up is in a straightjacket shaking a dead geranium.
- Maybe start with the bizarre privatisation of Telstra, leaving both the entire legacy network and all its services in the package. I mean, lets face it, no privately owned business with a monopoly on the carriage system would ever use it to disadvantage their competitors, would they? Oh!? How Jolly unsporting.
- Perhaps they'll do better with the digital TV spectrum. Nope, lets not allow the TV channels to decide how they use it, lets force them to use the new technology to exactly reproduce the old structure and burn the bandwidth on HDTV instead of possible multichanneling. Well THAT's succeeding like crazy. But it does enshrine the status quo for the media companies so maybe there's a point to it.
In fact I couldn't put it better than Tom Burton in today's Sydney Morning Herald.
"Free-to-air digital TV in theory offers the prospect of new players but, as with pay TV, the big media groups have effectively logjammed its development with a set of restrictions Albania would be proud of." Exactly - Lets meanwhile make it illegal for anyone to produce TV-like programmes over broadband networks; hmm, more status quo protection, but a huge contribution to innovation and development of the media business. Or not.
- Or lets look back a little to the days when Australia decided that it could censor the Internet
I've had to hold up friends in Sweden and administer sal volatile on that one - This year sees a new law that makes it illegal to transmit information on euthanasia by phone fax, email or website which is more pathetic than funny.
- As well they are now contemplating tapping the communications of people not even suspected of a crime - hey if its good enough for the US to piddle away billions on an illegal wiretapping scheme that has produced absolutely zero, it MUST be OK for the deputy sheriff and his boys.
But now friends, we come to the crowning glory so far. Australia bans digital game.
The Classification Review Board on Wednesday refused to classify the game, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, meaning it cannot be sold, demonstrated, hired or imported.
Now, lets face it, some games are grossly violent, sexually malignant and appeal to the basest instincts of the players, and, like movies, we have a rating system that is supposed (OK, it can't work) to keep them out of the hands of the highly impressionable.
So was this game riven with violence, blood gore, rape, murder, attacks on policemen etc? Lets lift the corner of this particular carpet shall we?
The decision was endorsed last night by the Federal Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, who had asked the board to review of the game's MA15+ classification after concerns were voiced that the game would promote graffiti.
Racing getaway cars along footpaths mowing down grannies pushing prams = OK
Graffiti = totally unacceptable at any age.
Now you can make the case that a party totally obsessed with property rights would see vehicular mayhem as just another boost to GDP but defacing some contributo ... er public building was beyond the pale. You might even make the darker case, as Marc Ecko does, that
"It’s about sharing a fictional tale set in a futuristic city where freedom of expression has been suppressed by a corrupt government and how one young man is able to change his world by picking up a pen instead of a gun.
And you have to ask why that would get some of these guys squirming in their seats. Do they feel the blade, or the spraygun a little too close to their proclivities perhaps?
But I think there's something more fundamental. Practically every action, every piece of legislation screams it, they are petrified of change and above all, they are terrified of losing control of the message. Around here the expression "kangaroos loose in the top paddock" means a pretty seriously loony type, I think we've gone past that, I think the kangaroos might have been scared off by a whole new order of loopies.
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