Many companies are not satisfied with collecting only the personal information that customers provide during a transaction or sign-up, or even the additional pe

Maintenance work on the National Library’s roof will prevent public access to historical treasures, but it exposes something deeper - a failure of successive governments to value our cultural heritage.

The Federal Court has ordered Google LLC to pay $60 million in penalties for making misleading representations to consumers about the collection and use of their personal location data on Android phones between January 2017 and December 2018, following court action by the ACCC.

On Dec. 6, Australia passed a surprising law with a global impact on privacy. The new law requires any Australian company to build backdoors t

Nice succinct summary.

But the bullshit I’m interested in right now is that populating Australia’s copyright reform debates.  A great deal of this bullshit is motivated by good intentions – most notably, the desire to sustain writers’ incomes in an era of precipitous, disastrous decline.

The Australian copyright community has been shocked by a scandal involving the Copyright Agency, a copyright collective that diverted millions of dollars intended for authors toward a lobbying and advocacy fund designed to fight against potential fair use reforms. The collective reportedly withheld A$15 million in royalties from authors in order to build a war chest to fight against changes to the Australian copyright law. I wrote last month about my experience in Australia, where groups such as the Copyright Agency have engaged in a remarkable effort to mislead policy makers on the state of copyright law in Canada. A former director of the Copyright Agency describes the latest situation as "pathetic" noting that it was outrageous to extract millions from publicly-funded schools for a lobbying fund.  The Australian case is far from an isolated incident. A quick search reveals plenty of examples of legal concerns involving copyright collectives with corruption fears in Kenya and competition law concerns in Italy over the past couple of months as well as recent fines against Spanish collecting societies. In fact, Jonathan Band and Brandon Butler published an eye-opening article several years ago chronicling an astonishing array of examples of corruption, mismanagement, lack of transparency, and negative effects for both creators and users from copyright collectives around the world.