Fair use doctrine: copyright defence: floodgates or fair go?

The Australian Law Reform Commission has recommended Australia amend the Copyright Act to adopt the fair use doctrine.

While the reform's most ardent opponents would have us believe we are opening the floodgates to a defence that is too unpredictable, these fears are borne of a misunderstanding of its operation.

You've just made a copy of your music library so that you can use it in your car. You paid for the music and it's all stored on the PC. You want to store it in the cloud so that you can access it from any computer in the world. But the copyright owner is the only one with the exclusive right to make copies of the music. At present, there needs to be a specific exception in the Copyright Act that allows you to do so (unfortunately, at present, there isn't).