Copyright Extended
I missed this when news about the “Free” Trade agreement with the US started filtering through over a week ago. Caught up among the rest of the concessions is that Australia has agreed to extend its copyright period for an additional 20 years. That means, works that have fallen out of copyright within the last two decades will once again revert to copyright at the end of the year. Copyright, as this Age article explains, is more restrictive in the US because the corporate intellectual property holders there wield a tremendous amount of power, and now that power has bled over into Australia.
See also: http://www.opensecrets.org