The AFL and NRL victory threatens Australia’s reputation as a nation friendly to innovation.

Optus has been forced to halt its TVNow mobile streaming service after a legal appeal decided that the service infringed on the rights of Australia's two major football leagues, the AFL and NRL.

The service let Optus mobile customers schedule TV recordings and then stream them to their mobile phone. They could even watch shows while still recording them, with a 90-second delay, which is what upset the sporting leagues as they charge Telstra millions of dollars for the rights to stream football matches online.

Now the Federal court has upheld an appeal against the earlier decision, deciding that Optus' actions are a breach of copyright. It found that Optus is at least in part responsible for the act of recording, not the end user alone. If Optus and the end user "acted in concert for the purpose of making a recording", the court ruled that the recordings can not be considered to be for "private or domestic use" -- thus losing their protection under law.

Industry bodies OzHub and the Australian Digital Alliance were quick to criticise the ruling, fearing that it will stifle innovation and threaten technology neutrality.

“The decision by the appeal court overturns the principle from the first court decision that the law applies to what consumers are entitled to do, and should not try to dictate different rules for different technologies," said Matt Healy, chairman of OzHub -- an industry alliance created to promote the use of and investment in cloud services in Australia.

“Putting aside all the excitement and hyperbole that this case has caused in recent weeks, there is a very simple principle that has been lost today; that in a time of media convergence the law should be technology neutral where possible."

The Australian Digital Alliance also warned that the Federal Court’s decision protects legacy models and legacy technologies.

“It’s clear from the Federal Court’s decision that current purpose-based copyright exceptions protect legacy models, legacy technology. This is disadvantageous for consumers, and for the growth of the digital economy in Australia. We need flexible exceptions that support future innovation," said Derek Whitehead OAM, Chairman of the Australian Digital Alliance.

“The Federal Court’s decision creates serious uncertainty for creators and providers of cloud-based services, who could be held liable for the infringements of their subscribers.”

Having lost the iiNet appeal, will Australia's copyright police start kicking down doors?

Will AFACT target pirates in their lounge rooms? I don't think so, the policy of chasing end users was a PR disaster in the US and Australia wouldn't be any different. But there's more than one way to fight a war. Rather than surgical strikes or fear campaigns, I think you can expect the copyright policy to focus on carpet-bombing the internet.

To nip piracy in the bud, copyright holders are lobbying hard for draconian laws that will undermine the foundations of the internet such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the Stop Online Piracy Act. Just ask the backers of Megaupload what's coming.

With its efforts to target ISPs shot down and a reluctance to battle it out in the streets, expect the copyright policy to back a scorched earth policy. They're going to step up the backroom war on the foundations of the internet.

Why do we treat music and video differently?

When MP3 players first went on sale in Australia, the only way to get your own music onto them was to break the law and copy your CDs to your computer. Then five years ago Australian copyright law finally changed to permit CD ripping, even though we'd all been doing it for years. Yet the law stopped short of permitted DVD ripping, promising to reassess the situation in a few years.

Most people rip their DVDs for the same reason they rip their CDs, to protect the original and to enjoy the content on other devices. If you've seen what kids and their grubby fingers can do to an expensive DVD, you'll understand why people create a digital DVD jukebox and then put away the originals for safe-keeping. It's easy to rip your DVDs with software such as AnyDVD and watch them on a media centre PC or media player. You're breaking copyright law, but everyone seems content to look the other way.

The time to review this law has come with the Attorney General's department issuing Draft Terms of Reference for the Australian Law Reform Commission Reference on Copyright. Submissions close on April 27 and the Commission is to report no later than November 30, 2013.

The scope includes "a review of exceptions in relation to technological protection measures", but I expect DVD ripping will end up in the too hard basket. It requires dealing with the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act we inherited as part of the US Free Trade Agreement -- which lets us rip commercial DVDs as long as we don't break the encryption, which is impossible. It's as absurd as telling people they're allowed to watch a DVD as long as they don't take it out of the case.

The rules need to change but personally I don't think Australian lawmakers have the stomach for such a fight. They'll just bow to the demands of such a powerful industry. Sadly it's easier to just keep an absurd law on the books and ignore it.

It's still pot luck as to whether Apple's iTunes Match can actually match your songs.

iTunes Match is Apple's streaming music service, although it's different to alternatives such as Spotify and Rdio. While they give you access to millions of tracks for around $10 per month, iTunes Match only lets you listen to music you already own. You can stream that music to an iGadget, Apple TV or iTunes running on a computer.

At first glance iTunes Match seems pretty lame compared to subscription music services, especially when you consider that you're paying Apple $AU34.99 per year. But it has a few strengths, at least in theory.

One advantage of iTunes Match is that it recreates your iTunes library in the cloud and uploads any missing tracks, to ensure you've got access to all your music. In this aspect it's an improvement on Rdio and Spotify, which won't let you listen to some albums online due to annoying regional rights agreements.

The other advantage is that iTunes Match lets you download 256 kbps AAC copies of files it's matched on your hard drive, which is handy if you've previously ripped music at lower quality and can't be bothered finding the CD and ripping it again.

Unfortunately there's one major problem with iTunes Match, it's not very good at matching songs. That's a pretty serious problem considering matching songs is its primary job. In my testing iTunes Match has failed to identify one or two tracks in dozens of albums, even though Gracenote identified them correctly when they were ripped from CD. This means it's spent hours uploading gigabytes of music that it should have recognised.

What's most annoying is that there's no way to correct iTunes Match's mistakes, so if it can't match a song you can't download the 256 kbps AAC. Considering iTunes Match has been available for months, it's pretty disappointing that Apple hasn't fixed the problem or introduced a way to correct mistakes.

iTunes 10.6.1 was released overnight but it doesn't seem to fix the issue. I've tried deleting and re-importing the affected tracks, as well as disabling iTunes Match and turning it back on. But it still refuses to recognise many songs even though the albums are available for purchase from the iTunes Store.

Considering Apple's shaky start to the cloud with MobileMe, I really expected Cupertino to go all out to ensure that iTunes Match could actually do what it's supposed to do. So much for stuff that "just works".

Telstra's half-hearted PVR is starting to shine as a streaming media player.

Whether you take a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty view of Telstra's set-top box depends on what you're looking for in a lounge room companion. If you're primarily after a Personal Video Recorder there are far better options around, although the new Freeview-enabled PVRs won't be of much use until the networks can manage to get their CRID data accurate (yes Nine, I'm looking at you).

If you're primarily after a media player then the T-Box looks a lot more attractive. At launch it had access to several online Bigpond TV channels along with the revamped Bigpond Movies service. Later Telstra added basic Foxtel access, including live AFL. A few weeks ago it enabled streaming media features which let it play video across your home network from a DLNA server such as a computer or network drive.

Now Telstra has finally announced it's adding the ABC's iView Catch Up TV service to the T-box "later this year", a move that's been on the cards for more than 12 months. iView access will certainly add to the T-Box's usefulness, although the ABC content is unlikely to be unmetered as the Telstra content is for Bigpond customers.

The iView announcement comes as part of Telstra's Connected Home push which is obviously designed to deeply embed Telstra hardware and services in Australian lounge rooms before the NBN brings true competition. Whether you like Telstra or not, you have to admit that the T-Box is starting to look like a valuable addition to any Bigpond customer's lounge room.

Other set-top box vendors might offer better PVRs, but they'll need to keep adding new features and services if they want to stay in the game. Yes TiVo Australia, I'm looking at you.