The Australian Government is to open the doors for parallel importation of legitimately produced software and computer and videogames.
The move will allow any Australian importer to bring software into Australia as soon as it is available overseas.
In the past imports of software, particularly electronic games has been strictly controlled and policed by the major games companies.
However, the government says the reforms to the Copyright Act to allow parallel importation should bring prices down.
Acting Treasurer John Fahey, Communications and IT Minister Richard Alston and Attorney General Daryl Williams announced the reforms in a joint statement after receiving a report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
The report claimed Australia computer games were 33 percent higher than in the United States, but the Australian Visual Software Distributors Association has attacked the report as inaccurate and misleading.
AVSDA chief executive Megan Simes said the ACCC reports was based on the retail prices of just nine computer games and did not look at video games. By comparison a study carried out by Access Economics that looked at 97 per cent of all game sales in 1998 showed prices in the United Kingdom were 32 per cent higher than Australia and US prices were only seven per cent lower than here.
Access had described the ACCC report as badly flawed and should not be relied on. Any expectation of prices dropping as a result of removing import restrictions was misleading, Simes said.
The reforms will also apply to books, periodicals and printed music, although the parallel importation of books will not be implemented for 12 months after the amendments to the Act have been passed.
Apart from games, a wide range of software will be effected including word processing, database manages and graphical analysis programs.
The ACCC has welcomed the proposed reforms saying it had been advocating them for many years. Commission chairman Professor Allan Fels said Australia had long been a hostage to the interests of multinational companies in publishing and computer software and consumers had paid through the nose for years.
He said both businesses and consumers would benefit from the removal of restrictions on packaged business and educational software.
