In Optus v NRL, Australia’s Federal Court recently held that consumers had broad rights to “time shift” television programs, including via the use of remote recording and storage devices. The applicants were the AFL and the NRL, sporting organisations which had big plans for the...

Avoision describes conduct which seeks to exploit 'the differences between a law's goals and its self-defined limits' - a phenomenon particularly apparent in tax law. This short paper explains how the technology company Aereo utilised avoision strategies in an attempt to design its way out of...

Current copyright terms are primarily justified as being necessary to incentivise cultural production, to incentivise investment in existing works to ensure their continued availability and preservation, and to recognise and reward authors for their creative contributions. This paper makes the...

Businesses are exploiting perceived gaps in the structure of copyright rights by ingeniously designing their technologies to fulfill demand for individual access through a structure of personalized copies and playback engineered in ways intended to implicate neither the public performance nor...

Proposed copyright reforms are typically situated as being pro-user/anti-author (or vice versa). When it comes to making normative judgments about how far copyright rights ought to extend however, we need to ask more than whether a change might make one or another interest worse off. Since...

Australia’s Full Federal Court recently overturned the findings of the trial judge in the Optus v NRL television time-shifting case. Finding that the time-shifting provider (and not just the user) “makes” the relevant recording, the decision effectively renders remote television...

In 2007, Australia's Commonwealth Government took a dramatic new approach to the governance of remote Indigenous communities. The 'Northern Territory Intervention' aimed to combat abuse and violence in remote Indigenous communities, and included far-reaching changes to welfare administration,...

This special focussing on internet policy in Australia provides a snapshot of developments on various topics (access, privacy, censorship) as a means of understanding better the state of play in Australia, and also how this compares to internet policy in other parts of the world, especially...