Internet Blackout Threat for Music Thieves in AU

An anonymous reader writes "News.com.au is reporting that the ARIA [Australia's Version of the RIAA] is making plans to have ISPs cancel or terminate the accounts of those who download music illegally. If the user is on dialup, that's not a problem: their telephone line will be disconnected. 'Fed up with falling sales, the industry — which claims Australians download more than one billion songs illegally each year — has been discussing tough new guidelines with internet service providers (ISPs) since late last year. The music industry is lobbying for a three strikes and you're out policy to enforce their copyright. Under this system, people who illegally download songs would be given three written warnings by their Internet service provider. If they continued to illegally download songs, their internet account would be suspended or terminated.'"

Comments

Re:Scare tactics as usual

[lixee]

Sounds mostly like a "trial balloon", an idea floated up without any real expectation it will be implemented. Perhaps for scare value.

Good point. News,com.au is part of Murdoch's empire and as such, news from there should be taken with a grain of salt.

who cares about streaming?

[davidwr]

For pirates, streaming isn't important, bits-per-day is.

If ISPs limit bandwidth that may have some impact, but removing streaming won't.

If necessary, pirates will disguise their traffic as whatever is allowed under the current anti-piracy regime.

One Word.

[greedyturtle]

PeerGuardian. Cox Cable in Florida uses the same policy. One request from any random media company and they cut off your bandwidth. Give 'em a call and they warn you that you have two more chances and then they turn off your cable. Don't ever get Cox if you have a choice... but not because of this - they just stink in general. I installed PeerGuardian2 when I got off the phone with them, and haven't had an issue since.

over one billion severed?

[morethanapapercert]

Let's see here, ARIA is claiming >1,000,000,000 songs downloaded every year by Australians. According to Wikipedia, .au has a population of 20,788,357. This results in 48 songs for every man, woman and child in Australia every year* (I can't be bothered to RTFA, how long have they been doing this?) I dunno about you, but to me that looks more like an unexploited potential market. This is even more true when you consider that not every person in Australia has an Internet connection and of those who *do* have a connection, not all choose to infringe on corporately owned copyrights by downloading music without ARIA's blessing. Based on hearsay and such, I'll make a wild guess and say it's more like ten million Aussies downloading >150 songs each per year. That's only roughly 600MB per person/account but I've heard that Australia has poor long haul connections to the rest of the world, so downloading that much from other people around the world shows a great deal of interest. Ten million music fans, all heavy consumers and the **IA can't figure out a working micro-pay/pay-as-you-go music download system?

*For the sake of simplicity, I ignore Tasmania and the other islands, although I'm sure ARIA is counting them. I also round off the decimals

Re:Slash-egos prevent this

[giorgiofr]

1. Please explain how using the connection I bought within the limits set by my contract is "abuse". What do you mean, I don't have any limits? That's because I bought the expensive UNLIMITED connection, duh. 2. Not as big a group? *Everyone* I know who's not afraid of double clicking an icon downloads stuff 24/7. 3. Pirate ISPs? BRILLIANT! All we need is a VPN, and then oh-im-so-sorry-mr-isp, all my traffic is encrypted :)

Re:Monopolies prevent this

[Antique Geekmeister]

They don't have to. Take a look at a typical Acceptable Use Policy. They don't have to provie it in court, they simply have to find that you're doing something against their policies. The same policy that some of us beg to be used against spammers and phishers and virus-laden zombie machines is similar to what RIAA wants used against pirating downloaders, and it does *not* require a trial.

Re:Monopolies prevent this

[KeensMustard]

You typically only have one service provider in a given area. Really? In rural/regional areas I suppose you might be stuck with Telstra, but I wouldn't describe that as typical. In metropolitan areas you can choose from numerous carriers - Telstra may own the hardware (mostly) but that doesn't entitle them to say who uses it.

You forgot one:

[Penguinisto]

Common Carrier Status.

If an ISP starts doing any company (or cartel's) bidding, they no longer can claim to be neutral for content. This means that if so much as one child porn images streaks across an ISP's wires or servers, they can be credibly liable. After all, they actively prohibit copyright infringement, so why can't they stop or prevent the commission of a real criminal (or even tortious) act? While I doubt that criminal prosecutors would take that to heart, I do know that it would very likely leave a participating ISP quite defenseless to any civil suit that comes along naming them as a defendant...

/P

Re:Scare tactics as usual

[MichaelSmith]

labels have been losing sales not due to competition/substitution from downloads, but from a lack of new, fresh product to sell

No kidding:

This is despite big-selling albums from Australian Idol winner Damien Leith

If their argument is going to be that nobody is buying our stuff despite Australian idol being on TV then they are truely stuffed. To be honest I don't know of anybody who bothers with P2P. Its easier to buy the CD and rip.

Re:The RIAAs Rights

[cpt kangarooski]

My statements that pirating music is immoral are based on the law granting ownership of copyrighted material to the copyright owners, thus making it stealing to pirate music, and on it being moral to follow the law and immoral to break it (when the law itself is not inherently immoral).

It's not moral to act lawfully where a law is amoral. Lawfulness does not ever in itself yield moral behavior. Morality and legality are orthogonal, though it's nice when they coincide. Your position would render jaywalking an immoral act when I think that we can all agree that it is neither moral nor immoral to jaywalk.

While I think that people should behave lawfully, it is important for the law to not only be non-immoral, but also to generally be acceptable to the people who are to obey it unless it is really important. Look at Prohibition: it wasn't an inherently immoral law, but it was also so far from the prevailing social norms of the day that no one obeyed it. This led to disrespect not only for that law, but for others, to widespread corruption, law-breaking, and a golden age for organized crime. I think that copyright is a lot like Prohibition. Most people think it's a good idea but ignore it (Prohibition did have a lot of earnest supporters who nevertheless drank anyway). I think that this indicates that the people are in the right, and that the law absolutely must change. If this were about something important, e.g. civil rights, then I'd think that perhaps the people were wrong in their position and should be brought around, but copyright is a pretty unimportant sort of law so far as that goes.

This being the case, I don't complain about copyright infringers, I complain about the law that makes their behavior infringement. I can't condemn people for ignoring a bad law, but I can condemn lawmakers and their supporters for allowing the situation to continue.

Declining sales?

[Chuck Chunder]

If a system like this were put in place and rigorously enforced, and after a year the Australian music industry still saw declining sales

What do you mean "still"? 2006 saw an increase in sales.

Quie right

[svunt]

You're right...I'm in Melbourne, and can choose from dozens and dozens of ISPs...most of them do suck, however. As there's basically no such thing as unlimited downloading in Australia (see previous sentence) I'm agog that we manage to steal a billion dollars worth of music a year, as it takes so fucking long to steal on our crappy bandwidth.

Re:Scare tactics as usual

[NoMaster]

The logic is quite erronious: labels have been losing sales not due to competition/substitution from downloads, but from a lack of new, fresh product to sell. ... Sales would drop even with zero downloading.

Actually, even that is erroneous (or, at least, not backed up by the facts).

A couple of days ago, ARIA were feeding the "OMFG! Illegal downloads are ruining the poor, struggling, defenceless record industry in Australia" line to the media, and the media were dutifully repeating it far and wide. But anyone who actually took the time to read ARIA's own press release learned a different story : the value of CD sales fell 5%, but actual sales rose by 8%! Not to mention the whole wholesale market - CDs, downloads, and god knows what else they count (ringtones?) - rose by a whopping 27%!

(Thoughtful aside: when the media in this country can't even report a fuckin' press release properly, how are you supposed to believe anything else they tell you???

But I won't turn this into a rant against the Australian media industry. I did that yesterday... ;-)

Re:"...more than one billion songs..."

[chrism238]

Ummm, been doing maths long? That'd be 700 songs per user per year.

Re:Say goodbye to the Blacksmiths of this century

[Soruk]

GP poster is (apparently) in Norway, where British English will have more influence than American English. Here in UK, the correct spelling is "disc", however "disk" is unfortunately common due to the influence of American businesses in the computer industry. Philips, the inventor of the CD, is European. Take any CD with the Compact Disc logo and check how they spelt "disc".