Why The Safe Harbour Should Be Abolished

The Copyright Safe Harbour is a legislative bargain between telecommunication industry and copyright owners. Telecommunication providers in particular were worries about their potential liability for the acts of their users, they not aware what their users doing and they are reluctance to be liable when those users do infringe copyright using their networks. This creates a lot of uncertainty when internet service providers are liable for the acts of their users. Therefore, the Safe Harbour Scheme are designed for internet service providers to provide some certainty. They provide a limitation on monetary penalties or monetary damages for suits of infringement of copyright, by stipulating internet service providers have the legal rights to help copyright owners to send take down notices and remove infringing materials in order to avoid potential liabilities and allow consumer to challenge the wrongful or mistakenly remove if the material were theirs.

In 2005, Australia agreed to adopt Australia-US Free trade agreement provisions. The Australian Safe Harbour are modeled
If an internet intermediaries is liable or likely to be liable for copyright infringement, they can follow the conditions set out at the Safe Harbour Scheme and enact certain provisions that ensures that they will be immune from potential monetary damages in any future copyright suit. This creates a significant drawbacks compare to countries that adopted the similar scheme like Europe, United States, South Korea and Singapore. It has always been argued that the Safe Harbour Scheme should be expanded not only limits to Carriage Internet Service Providers. Despite that, internet service provider also has to meet certain criteria only would be immune under Safe Harbour Scheme, such as take down the material once they got notified, failed to do so they will be held