The Australian government has said it will expand the safe harbour regime under the Copyright Act to the educational, cultural, and disability sectors, including while such organisations use a cloud service provider.

The third reading of the Copyright Amendment (Service Providers) Bill 2017 was agreed to by the Senate on Thursday, but has yet to pass the House of Representatives.

The government had tabled its response[1] to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on Wednesday, noting the "ongoing entrenched and polarised views of stakeholders on safe harbour reform" as a reason for not supporting an extension of safe harbours to all carriage and service providers.

In its response, it rejected the Australian Greens dissenting recommendation that "service provider" be defined as "a provider of transmission, routing, or connections for digital online communications without modification of their content between or among points specified by the user of material of the user's choosing".

However, the government supported in principle the Greens' suggestion that it clarify in the explanatory memorandum "the language related to activities that are carried out by a third-party provider 'on behalf' of an entity that is a 'service provider'".

"The addendum clarifies the government's intention that institutions that will come within the definition of 'service provider' in the Bill may engage third parties, such as cloud service providers, to carry out some or all of system and network activities on their behalf," the government response said.

"By doing so, that institution will retain safe harbour protection."

The government response also reiterated its intention to skip geoblocking reforms[2].

The Senate committee had in March advised extending the safe harbour regime[3], though it stopped short of adding all providers

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