Here’s a little background from S.L.A.M. (Save Live Australia’s Music), a “non-politically aligned, independent entity made up of musicians and music-lovers”:

In a bid to address street violence, Liquor Licensing Victoria (LLV) has introduced sweeping changes with unintended consequences for the local music scene.

LLV should admit its mistake and make simple changes immediately, acknowledging that there is no link between live music and high risk. The Tote is gone, who’s next?

On 23 February, coinciding with the 34th anniversary of AC/DC’s famous ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top’ film clip shoot down Swanston Street, S.L.A.M. is protesting in support and celebration of Victoria’s music scene, where new liquor licensing laws threaten to pull the plug on live music.

Today is the day people!  If you’re in Melbourne this afternoon and want to show your support (or just hang out with your favourite local musicians), head over to the State Library at 4pm, where they’ll be marching to Parliament House and being generally disgruntled until 7pm 6pm.

I work in the city, so I’m hoping to stop by later on.  I’ll be sure to take some of my usual low-quality Blackberry photos.  Come say hi if you’re there, I’m the one in the brown jumper (because stupid me forgot to bring one of my many local band t-shirts).

Update: as promised, my happy snaps…

You can find more photos from the rally under the “slam” tag on Flickr.

iiNet won their court case against AFACT!!

If that statement alone has you fist-pumping the air right now, then carry on celebrating noble freedom fighter!

If you’re wondering why I’m so happy, let me explain.  Way back in November 2008, Australian ISP iiNet was taken to court by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) for allegedly failing to pass on copyright infringement notifications to its customers.  AFACT argued that by not enforcing their demands, iiNet was supposedly “authorising piracy” on their network.

Let me put it to you like this: if someone steals water from their neighbour’s garden hose, is the water company responsible because they provided the water?  The correct answer of course is HELL NO!  The water company is just a utility providing a service, they’re not responsible for how water is used.  In the same way, ISPs are a utility for providing internet services, not for policing how it’s used.  If AFACT had their way, ISPs would be forced to monitor all their customers’ usage.  It’s illegal for the postal service to check our mail, so why should ISPs be allowed to snoop on our internet activity?

Despite logic being on our side, most of us didn’t expect iiNet to win this case.  However, last Thursday Justice Dennis Cowdroy found that iiNet did not authorise the infringements and ruled in their favour.  Cowdroy stated that “The mere provision of access to the internet is not an authorisation of infringement“.  Despite what AFACT would have us believe, this does not mean pirates are “off the hook”.  After the verdict was announced, iiNet CEO Michael Malone emphasised that they do not condone piracy, but insisted that litigation isn’t the right way to fight it.  Rather, the best way to deal with the issue is to make the content available legally online in a way that’s mutually beneficial for the studios and the consumers.  Couldn’t have said it better myself.

That’s nice, but why do I care?

You should care because this is a big win for our privacy as consumers.  It means the big studios can’t bully ISPs into breaching the privacy of their customers.  The pretence of fighting piracy doesn’t give them the right to spy on all of us, and fortunately the court saw it that way too.

Just when things were looking gloomy for Australians with the proposed internet censorship filter still undefeated, it’s nice to see some good news for once.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You may have noticed a No Clean Feed banner on this site lately. If you’re unfamiliar with this cause, you should know that No Clean Feed is an initiative by Electronic Frontiers Australia in protest against the Australian government’s proposed mandatory internet censorship filter, a filter not unlike the infamous Great Firewall of China. This is the first of its kind in a democratic country and hopefully the last. You might think this is a good thing to help protect children from all the bad stuff in the world (wide web), but here’s why it’s not:

• It doesn’t work.  The proposed censorship system only filters unencrypted web (HTTP) traffic.  Not only is this relatively easy to circumvent (for those so inclined), but the filter has no effect on chat-rooms, peer-to-peer file sharing and other internet mediums, which is where you’ll find most of the stuff they want to block.
• The filter is based on a secret blacklist.  Only the government gets to decide what’s on the list, we don’t get a say when they get it wrong.  There have already been reported cases where legitimate business were blacklisted during the filter trials.
• There is no opt-out.  Even if you’re a consenting adult over the age of 18, you’re still treated to the same content censorship as everyone else.
• We pay the price.  The cost of rolling out a censorship filter that no one wants will be passed on to the ISPs, and then on to us.
• It’s a dangerous precedent.  This could be the start of a global trend that will cripple the web for everybody.

Surely no free country would introduce such a scheme, right?  Think again: in December 2009, Stephen Conroy released the reports from the trial program and now it seems the federal government will give it the go ahead.

Blood boiling yet?  Good, now you’re ready to fight back.

You can help raise awareness by darkening your website (like we did) or your profile photo during The Great Australian Internet Blackout from January 25 to 29 (which includes Australia Day).  Find out how to black out your profile picture and join the resistance.  We lost the battle, but the war has only just begun.

Imagine there are no record labels, just artists connecting directly with fans.  No middle man required.

Imagine there’s no RIAA and sharing music was legal, free and unrestricted.

Imagine if fans were free to share any music from their favourite artists, helping them reach a diverse audience. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Literally.

Imagine portable devices designed to make sharing media between friends easy… like Zune‘s squirt feature, but without the DRM.

Imagine if your portable music player was a short-range private radio station and friends nearby could listen in via their own media devices.

Imagine media sharing as just another form of communication, like sending an SMS text message.

Can you imagine?

(photo by Juliano Mattos, used under Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch Kevin Rose interview the man for an episode of Digg Dialogg.  It runs for about 40 minutes, so settle in with a bottle of wine and get ready to open your mind.