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Australian ISPs Reject Calls To Police Their Users
jon_cooper writes "After recent setbacks in the RIAA's lawsuits, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has decided to try a different approach in Australia - they want ISPs to do their dirty work for them. Australian ISPs, though, have soundly rejected calls from AFACT to slow down or terminate user accounts that AFACT has determined are being used to distribute copyrighted works. Telstra (one of the larger ISPs in question) had this to say: 'We do not believe it is up to the ISPs to be judge, jury and executioner in relation to the issue when the content owners have any number of legal avenues to pursue infringements.'"
There isn't any RIAA in Australia. It's ARIA.
The issue here is the customer service costs (and loss of revenue). If an ISP cuts off a customer (rightfully or wrongfully), it's the ISP that pays for the irate calls from those customers and suffers from a loss of revenue. Even if the ISP uses an Indian call center, they still face several to tens of dollars in costs as the customer tries to determine why they were cut-off and how to regain service.
Assuming that people have a right to confront the accuser (AFACT), then shouldn't AFACT bear the labor costs of that confrontation?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I find that part particularly interesting purely because of the idea of pirating TV shows, how, exactly, do you pirate TV shows? Watching them on TV is a free service, you have also been able to record from the TV for a very long time, what exactly is the difference between recording from the TV, and downloading the show from the net, and how does that effect the broadcasting industry?
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Of course, New Zealand is rightfully sovereign, but I'm not sure that calling an ISP that services both Australia and New Zealand a "multinational".
Do you realise that this kind of attitude is why Americans are stereotyped as being totally ignorant and ego-centric? Just because a company doesn't cater to your precious US of A, it doesn't mean it isn't multinational. Multi. National. It means that it operates in multiple nations. Such as Australia and New Zealand.
Australia has Telstra the former national government owned incumbent telephone monopoly that still thinks its part of the government .
- hate-telstra/2007/05/19/1179497337693.html?page=fu llpage
Because it was the national incumbent Testra still own most of the infrastructure and has control over the Australian backbone that is leases to ISPs at exorbitant rates ,
Most Australian broadband plans are either metered or capped .
Mark Pesce an American that Lives in Australia (although we call him an Aussie now since hes applied for Citizenship ) who was also one of the creators of VRML did a great piece in the Meblorne Age why Aussies hate Telstra
http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/why-we-all
... and that's really the crux of the matter. Every picture you take, every letter you write, every story you tell, whatever you create is copyrighted -- by you. You have every right in the world to distribute your creations and you expect to. When you browse a company's web-site, you are receiving images and content that are, ostensibly, copyrighted by them which they also freely distribute so that you can view them on your own computer.
The key is not that a work is copyrighted, but rather that the distribution occurs without the permission of the copyright holder. There's where it gets sticky. The ISP knows you are exchanging copyrighted works because everything is copyrighted. What the indutry is asking for is that the ISP identify specific chunks of data for which the distribution constitutes infringement. But how can the ISP know whether infringement is taking place?
For something to be infringing, they will need to know whether or not the sender of the content is the copyright holder, a licensee for the content with permission to redistribute (like iTunes), the terms under which the content may be distributed (only if fee collected and DRM in place), whether those terms are met (valid credit card number used / the user hasn't implemented a hack to remove DRM), whether the copyright has expired (there are still some copyrights that expire), or whether the distribution constitutes an exception to copyright protection (such as a "fair use" under US law). How can the ISP possibly know these things?
Well, they can't possibly distinguish (doubly so if the content is encrypted). Some of those things can only be answered by a court.
Nevermind it being an unnecessary burden on ISPs or a violation of their customers, the ISP is simply unable to know the legal context in which data is distributed and whether it may constitute infringement. Any accusation of that sort would necessarily need to be vetted through the approriate legal authority, not the ISP.
Well as you're 'Speaker of the truth,' I guess nobody likes the always on connection, modem latency isn't a problem, and people don't need the phone line free to talk to people.
They took the A that would normally stand for America and put it at the front, and made it stand for Austral... oh... I see what you did there.
I won't even get into the problems with the copper infrastructure vs. fiber. I'll even leave the cost analysis out of the equation.
"Luke, you've switched off your targeting computer, what's wrong?"