REALLY? Can 10 per cent of Aussie jobs be threatened by pirates? Nearly one-in-ten Australian jobs are at risk from Google, if the co-chairman and co-CEO of Village Roadshow Australia is to be believed. That's the datum that appears in this opinion piece Graham Burke over at The Age, which continues the copyright industry's leave-no-data-unmolested attack on every threat, real or perceived …
There is a big difference between an employee whose job involves copyright and one whose job relies on copyright and would be in danger without it.
Take on of the examples given - The Arts.
There are composers and writers but there are also performers. Orchestras around Australia, for example, predominantly play works that are out of copyright. They do so because they are free to perform. The same goes for other arts companies. Just look at what happened in the US when, in 1994, Congress finally brought the US into line with other countries by extending copyright to cover foreign works, thus effectively removing thousands of works from the public domain. It was challenged in the Supreme Court because it would put jobs at risk.
Similar applies across other industries but the above is just to make the point that free access to works is very important for some jobs
I'm sure APRA does somebody good, but if it's anybody other than the original songwriters and their up-to-three-generations-removed descendants I don't know who it is. (75 years after death, remember.)
If you choose to sing a copyrighted song and fail to give APRA their cut, the fees can come to thousands of dollars.
"A few have been known to think."
Such as Nick Xenophon. I'll pop a short letter off to him on the subject. He's been supportive before when I've contacted him, such as with the Conroy net censorship controversy, so I'll see what he has to say about this little piece of bullshit.
Isn't everything, by default?
I'm not entirely sure how dealing with boring through a particular-shaped/density lump of rock in a particular location would be a usefully transferable piece of information. If it were, I suspect there'd be lots of it on TPB. I haven't looked, but I doubt there's much there beyond "Journey to the Centre of the Earth."
As per dan1980, reducing copyright might actually result in more raw material for orchestras to mine. Ah but of course, orchestra lobbying groups don't have funds to send politicans on fact-finding missions to the Bahamas.
If piracy risks/costs 10% of jobs, and piracy is already rife, does that mean that if copyright were strictly enforced then there would be a 10% increase in available jobs?
Actually that's probably accurate. If 30% of Australians pirate, and copyright were strictly enforced, those 30% would probably land in jail - freeing up 3 million jobs for the rest of us and creating law enforcement and prison warden positions to supervise around 6 million prisoners.
We would have an instant jump in available jobs!
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