Tech companies keep insisting that the current Australian copyright law needs to be changed in order to welcome the technological revolution. However, Australian Federation against Copyright Theft is perfectly satisfied with the current version of the legislation.
Such tech giants as eBay, iiNet, and Optus had a discussion with the Australian Law Reform Commission. They were arguing that the local Copyright Act should be updated, because the current law has a lot of restrictions – for the use of cloud storage, web search, and caching to name a few.

Outfits representing rights owners, including AFACT, have filed a joint submission in response. They claimed that there was no need to change the existing law. The submission says that technology in the last several decades has developed with copyright legislation in place. Within the last decade, the digital agenda legislation has done nothing to stifle legal economic activity or restrict consumer offerings. Obviously, such assumption is very far from the truth. For instance, iiNet and Optus have pointed out that Australia’s copyright legislation doesn’t allow caching – Google has confirmed this fact in its own submission.

Google pointed out that 15 years after search engines became widely used, a considerable business risk from locally hosting search in the country has appeared because of legal uncertainty. This is over the question whether the search engine activities of crawling, indexing, and caching are engaged into creating and communication of infringing works.

In response, rights owners claimed that caching restrictions weren’t a problem for Australian businesses thus far. They believe that it’s irrationally to claim that the development of the web isn’t advancing in the country because of a lack of undertake caching and indexing activity.

This discussion is still ongoing, and the Australian Content Industry Group claimed that piracy isn’t subject to the lack of legitimate material any more. The outfit said it was abundantly clear that creative industries and Internet service providers would increasingly be cooperating on more commercial opportunities to offer value-ads to the local subscribers, like video on demand, subscription music offerings, and so on. Perhaps, a few years ago it might have been reasonable to criticize the content industry for not making content available, but now it doesn’t make any sense.