Australia’s unfortunate copyright legislation
November 27th, 2006
I’ve been casually following the fallout from the recent Australian legislation regarding copyright, particularly in regard to digital mediums. Cory Doctorow has a brief article on BoingBoing that highlights one aspect of the ridiculous nature of this legislation: Search Engines will need explicit permission to index and cache Australian websites.
For what it’s worth, the Search Engines can consider this my permission to index and cache my humble little website. It makes me think, however, that if this is going to be a real obstacle, is there a tool that can be developed that automatically tells Search Engines that a particular web page is “search-friendly”? Hopefully, this won’t actually be required.
[Update] The SMH reports on a more recent development here.