Authors win book battle and more...

Authors win book battle
Restrictions on the importation of cheaper foreign-published books will remain in place, it was announced by the Federal Government this week. Changes proposed by the Productivity Commission earlier this year would have had a serious impact on the livelihood of Australia’s authors and publishers and the Alliance argued against them as a member of the Government’s subcommittee on Parallel Imports, which was commissioned to review the recommendations. See http://tinyurl.com/yaldnnp

Press freedom under fire in WA
In the last few years, five WA journalists were threatened with three years’ jail and a $60,000 fine for doing their jobs, 27 police raided a major Perth newspaper to search for a leaked Government document and a top WA journalist went to jail for refusing to name a confidential source. Visit http://tinyurl.com/yf9zyw8 to see the Alliance’s free speech video and online petition, signed by more than 150 leading WA journalists and media employers.

Murdoch mulls Google block
Rupert Murdoch is considering removing news articles from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online. Google, Microsoft and Ask.com "simply just pick up everything and run with it." Murdoch told Sky News this week. "We say they steal our stories.” According to data from Experian Hitwise such a move would be felt by News Corp - Google is the top traffic provider for News Corp.'s WSJ.com, accounting for more than 25 per cent of the site's traffic. See http://tinyurl.com/yjb5pl2

Courtesy of Australia's Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.