ARIA Sells a Licence for DJs to Format Shift Music

lucas writes "The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) has set up a new licence to let DJs format shift their music to use at gigs. DJs will need to pay a licence fee to copy music they already own legally from one format to another for ease of use, and as a back-up in case originals get lost or stolen. Criminal penalties for DJs involved in "music piracy" are up to sixty thousand dollars and 5 years imprisonment. There are also on-the-spot fines of over one thousand dollars."

In other news...

[jd]

The AIRA declared all Australians to be DJs, and that converting from optical media to an electronic signal in a player (and then from the electronic signal to an audible one) were conversions requiring a license. Botany Bay is to be used to house all juveniles who fail to pay the double licenses.

Dumb and dumber

[Anonymous Coward]

Beam me up scotty, no intellegent life here...

Re:No "fair use" in Australia

[jd]

I curse the ARIA with a plague of Rolf Harrises! And may they never guess what it is!

Re:In other news...

[Slimee]

Botany Bay is to be used to house all Botany Bay is actually quite a nice place now. The people we really don't like get sent to Woomera, Christmas Island and Naru.

I seem to remember a country that sent people it didn't like to another island too a long time ago...hmmmmm

Re:In other news...

[jd]

Ah! And the ones you hate, loath and despise, you exile to Canberra.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah! And the ones you hate, loath and despise, you exile to Canberra.

Amnesty are currently investigating this as being excessively cruel.

Re:In other news...

[bemo56]

Well we have a rather bad immigration system, but we are not cruel enough to force immigrants to put up with our politicians :P

Re:So when are they going to stop calling it buyin

[QuantumG]

About the same time they stop calling it "theft".

Re:In other news...

[AstrumPreliator]

You forgot Ceti Alpha V.

Re:In other news...

[Gideon Fubar]

yes, yes, we're all aware of that. Our last government was keen to show us that our British Overlords were right to send us here, for a myriad of reasons.

this latest lot.. well, they haven't really shown a position on it yet, afaik.

ARIA is an anagram of RIAA: figures!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, it's THEM. They just shuffled the letters around a bit. So don't act so surprised, I guess they ran a bit out of dead people and children to sue in the US (as a side effect of the living ones starting to call their bluff).