Sitting in the fifth row of the recent Make Poverty History concert in Melbourne, I was amidst a sea of cameras and camera phones clearly capturing video clips and as well as still photos. Some of the results were already up on YouTube the next morning, with more popping up over the next few days including clips from the next day's telecast.

Although this budding Spielberg didn't have great seats, I'm sure the people in front on me had clips to rival what was shown on the television the next day. While these fans might have the hardware to be their own television network, they're soon going to need the lawyers to match because, according to Crickey, what they're doing will be a criminal offence attracting $AU6600 fine under Australia's farcical new copyright laws. If you think this doesn't affect many people, take a look at what happened at a recent U2 concert in Sydney when Bono called on people to pull out their camera phones.

Possessing equipment to copy an unauthorised recording (such as a computer), making a copy of an unauthorised recording (such as to your computer) and playing an unauthorised recording publicly (such as on YouTube?) are also each worth another $AU6600 fine. That's a bloody expensive night out, even considering the exorbitant price of concert tickets these days.

Police will have the power to issue on-the-spot infringement notices incurring $AU1300 fines but have already said the laws are unenforceable, according to the Herald Sun.

Australia's proposed new copyright laws are so laughable they're getting international attention - from MSNBC to the International Herald Tribune and even the New York Law Journal - pointing out the laws could make using iPods and video-sharing sites like YouTube illegal. Once again the Australian government's response to new technology is, rather than attempting to understand it, to come up with ludicrous rules that no-one will follow just so it can say it's doing something and then hope the problem will go away. Insisting people only watch recordings of television shows once and then record over them is another example of the ridiculous approach this government is taking in its new copyright laws.

Perhaps the most hypocritical and insulting aspect of the whole thing is that politicians are perfectly capable of mastering new technologies when it serves their own purposes, such as finding loopholes in the Commonwealth Broadcasting Services Act makes it illegal to broadcast political ads in the hours before an election.

Is anyone is Canberra is listening? Once again the world is screaming from the roof tops that they're making a mistake, but they soldier on regardless. How can politicians expect people to take copyright laws seriously, or any laws for that matter, when they are so obviously written by people out of touch with technology and the real world.