Aust-US Free Trade Agreement; A Threat to Australian Mod Chipping

Thanks to Tim Richards for letting us know of this news...

Bigkid.com.au reports on a slashdot.org posting causing alot of interest, concerning Sony Computer Entertainment Australia getting ready to use the Australia-American Free Trade Agreement (FTA) to base a new case for outlawing PS2 mod chips; see here. To implement the already agreed FTA, some Australian laws will change, including copyright laws. The slashdot article refers to an article in the Australian IT, "Sony push to outflank PS2 mods", see here.

At the present time the Australian High Court is deliberating on an important legal case on chipping; Sony sued a mod chipper and the case has taken the last few years to wind its way from the Federal Court, via the Federal Court of Appeal, to the High Court. Should Sony be unsuccessful, the Australia IT reports Sony will launch a new case based on the changes to the law brought about by the FTA.

The Sony mod chipping news is timely. In the past few weeks I have emailed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to get a full copy of the Free Trade Agreement; at present the Government has the FTA spread over a number of formats and pages (html; pdf; in about 40 separate documents). The Department has said to me they haven't put the FTA together into one digital document because of its size, saying "it would be over 1200 pages and take up significant amounts of memory, making download very slow for most people".

Visit www.Gamenews.com.au to find out how you can help encourage the Department to make that content available for download...