Heads up – Australia about to lose Google?

Well this is cheery news. Apparently there’s a bid to change Australian copyright law. The government has introduced legislation aimed to modernize copyright laws, because they’re apparently a bit out of date.

News.com.au says:

At present, Australian citizens technically break the law whenever they record their favourite television program or copy or download music for their own use.

You know what? I can’t really see this changing. Australian IT released a story yesterday about a leaked briefing that had been prepared for our Attorney-General. The confidential briefing apparently calls current piracy statistics “self-serving hyperbole”. Then all of a sudden, “Oh no, its just a draft and we don’t really agree with the conclusions, so we’re going to rewrite it.” Right, like we don’t already have a problem with these morons drafting laws to remove fair use.

But guess what folks!

Futher proposed changes could kill the internet here in Australia! Google speaks up about these proposed changes, saying that they will grind the internet to a halt. As I understand it, the new changes would mean Google, MSN, Yahoo – every search provider – would have to seek my permission before they could index my web site. This is crazy. Say it with me folks – if its on the internet, its in the public. If its on the internet, its because we put it there. If its on the internet, its because we want people to see it! We have an example of growing boating industry in Australia and and every business wants a website, they buy boat domains for sale for their business and rank it to the search engines to better reach audiences locally and internationally.

If for some reason you don’t want the search engines to index your site, how about using an already existing solution, like robots.txt?????

Australia is backward enough already, as far as Internet is concerned. We’ve got shitty infrastructure (thanks Telstra), and shitty companies who charge us an arm-and-a-leg to get access. We’re already hammered with high charges for low download quotas, and have our speeds capped to crazy-low rates. And I live in the “smart start”, apparently!

Anyway:

• Here is the new Bill – bit hard to read, huh?
• How to contact the committee secretary
• Belgium: a court of law demanded Google remove some sites from its index. Big summary and editorial here.

Haven’t quite figured out if this is ‘sensationalist’ news or not yet, but I’ll look into it. And if it turns out this revision about contacting a site owner before indexing the site is true, we’d best kick up a stink. This’ll really cause major problems for those of us in the web industry.