Beware the long, wibbley-wobbley arm of the Law.

Whether you plan to come to Australia to visit or stay, one thing to be cautious of is the very odd interpretation of "Laws" that they use in this country. If you're famous, or otherwise deemed to be "important" than there are a completely different set of options available to you.

Case in point, Brisbane Bronco's assistant coach and ex-Player Allan Langer gets caught Drink-Driving at 3x the legal limit after losing a game. $1000 fine and 8mo. suspension of his license. Now normal people would also have a conviction recorded against them, but jumping to his defence his lawyer utters, "But think of my client's career." Apparently having a conviction recorded would have a negative impact on his career. Sorry? The last time I checked, doing something wrong, and illegal results in a conviction, and I don't care who you are but that generally results in a negative impact on your career. But I'm thinking if it works for Langer, then it should become an interesting argument for overturning convictions in the future. (Still, not as bone-headed as the Facebook Alibi that a NY judge conceeded. Talk about leaving a door WIDE open. Facebook Alibi) I mean the guy was probably innocent but what's to stop this kind of nonsense: "Joe: Yo! Tim, sit at my desk and send some Tweets about my Girl & Pancakes & stuff while I go find Sam and pop a cap in his ass!"

But if the courts here are one thing, they are flexible. You can get just about any case admitted into court, such as the legal pitbulls representing the motion picture industry taking an Australian ISP to court claiming that it was responsible for the potentially illegal download activities of its clients... Pretty much on the grounds that in advertising for a recent increase in bandwidth limits (which in Australia are already ridiculously expensive and puny) they mentioned downloading more MP3s and movies, and finished off with a cheery "Happy Downloading!". The BASTARDS! Oh wait, you can download "legal" MP3s and movies, you know, the stuff that you purchase online. It takes precious bandwidth to download that, and it's not like the film or music industries are compensating our additional bandwidth costs when we purchase them... Mind you, these are the people that torment those of us content to do the *right* thing and BUY DVDs just to get stuck watching several minutes of (often unskippable) propoganda about how it's wrong to steal movies.... Which I would think is one pretty appealing reason to pirate a copy of the damned movie just so you don't need to waste time ignoring that dribble. I hear the Blueray fans get even more annoying propoganda, to the point that someone demonstrated on Youtube that he could start downloading and watching a streamed, illegal version of the same movie faster than it took his Blueray copy of the movie to start playing. Still, back to the case at hand, I was amazed that it wasn't thrown out on day one; The Aussie courts/lawyers must be pretty hard up for money. This would be like trying to sue a gunshop for advertising a sale with the phrase "Happy Shooting!" on the basis that they could be incouraging folks to go out and murder someone. In the end, iiNet won the case... Hoorah! Now the movie industry has one more excuse to justify raising ticket and DVD prices, and the broadband enabled have one more excuse to start downloading instead of purchasing them. "Happy Downloading!"