“Music fans might soon have their iPods searched by Customs officers at airport checks and face jail if a large amount of pirated music is found on them.” Reports News.com.au.
“The push for the unprecedented searches of travelers’ laptops and MP3 players has been revealed in a leaked discussion paper relating to a treaty being negotiated by the Federal Government.It suggests criminal sanctions for infringements on a commercial scale.”
“That meant innocent pop and rock fans with huge song libraries could unwittingly be hit with jail for commercial piracy, according to Internet Industry Association chief executive Peter Coroneos.”
“It talks about (sanctions for) commercial infringements does that mean one, 10, 20 or 1000 songs?
“It could be that people get sent to jail for being in possession of commercial-scale quantities of copied music.”
“Foreign Minister Stephen Smith’s office has confirmed the Government was a part of negotiations for the international agreement, but Australia had not signed nor agreed to any aspect.”
“Choice spokesman Christopher Zinn said: “Searching into people’s iPods is out of order.”
Additional Thoughts: And I thought that the screening process at the airports was already painstakingly slow. Wait until they need to sift through the thousands of songs on people’s libraries. What is not made clear is how they are going to be able to determine what is in fact pirated and even if they are able to accomplish this, what type of sentencing will occur.
4 Comments to “Additional Airport Frisking may Attempt to Combat Piracy”
How exactly are you supposed to prove you purchased the songs on your iPod? The entire reason for me carrying my iPod is so I can leave my 300 CD’s at home. Or it is [still?] illegal in Australia to RIP your CD’s to your iPod?
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How could they possibly enforce this? So If I have 20,000 songs on my iPod I could go to jail, cause theres no way anyone could have that legitimately. Wow, just wow. Nearly everyone that owns an iPod probably has some sort of pirated material on it. How do you enforce a crime that everyone is guilty of to some degree. Silly.
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So, will they have a supercomputer that they can just hookup an iPod or any Apple device to and it will tell them instantly what files are pirated?
If so, that shit will definitely get hacked. And then we’ll have a DRM free for all. Whoever develops that software is going to go down hard, and Apple would NEVER develop software that can remove songs at the drop of a dime like that.
Ya know why? Because somewhere, on the administrative side of a system like that, someone will be able to add and delete DRM at their will, and if that system gets into the wrong hands and possibly gets released via… oh, I don’t know… the internet? Then Apple is completely screwed.
If this is true, it’s going to have be done very methodically… Which doesn’t seem possible. But, hopefully they can still get this done AND protect travelers from ongoing riots at the same time.
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man this is just to funny. do u know what kind of trouble this is going to cause. fuck man were talking apple no more! its gunna go down but just remeber if there is going to be sumthin like this developed, then and its succesfull theres still those rebels that find a way to work around that and say in their own words… fuck you!
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