A sad story:
Down in Australia they've been looking at updating their copyright laws to catch up to the digital age (read: to make the laws more favorable for an entertainment industry that refuses to adjust to the market), but seem to be doing so in a way that pretty much guarantees the opposite would occur. For example, one of the changes would effectively require search engines to ask permission of every web page they indexed.
It's one of those "sounds good in theory" ideas that is ridiculous in practice, and would pretty much make it impossible to have a search engine in Australia. Google has submitted their own take on this law, explaining why it would push Australia into "pre-internet" days.
This is the type of lawmaking that happens when lawmakers rely too much on a single industry (in this case, the entertainment industry) to detail the "problems" of the internet. It doesn't take into account what's really going on, or the fact that the complaining industry needs to learn how to adjust to the new technology — not beg for laws that hold back the technology.
When I decided I wanted to move to Australia rather than Spain after graduating, part of the reasoning was more advanced internet technology. Hopefully that decision wasn't premature… not that I've booked any plane tickets yet.
