The Wire

Every second person you see sitting on public transport these days seems to be plugged into an iPod or some other type of mp3 player. They’re widely popular because they’re compact and consumers can store a huge amount of music on them. But what many of these consumers probably don’t realize is that they’re actually breaking Australian copyright law by doing so – either because they have downloaded their music files from a free ‘peer to peer’ network or simply copied their own cd collection. For the past few years the record industry has been driving music consumers towards legitimate usage of music by discouraging the use of peer to peer networks and file sharing. This has most often taken the form of high profile legal actions against free download services like Napster, Kazaa and Grokster. You would think the record industry would be enthusiastically encouraging the use of legal download services, such as the new “iTunes Australia” but Alex Malik, a lawyer and PhD researcher at UTS specializing in copyright in the digital age, has found these services to be particularly lacking for Australian music consumers. Michael Jones asked him why.