Slashdot Mirror
Australian Government Considers Copying UK Copyright Law Ideas
msim brings word that Australian legislators are considering an anti-piracy measure that would require ISPs to terminate internet access for people who repeatedly download copyrighted material. The legislation would set up a three-strikes system similar to the one proposed in the UK recently. While British ISPs resisted suggestions that they act as internet police, the response may not be the same in Australia, where the government has already tried to censor the internet.
"Under the three-strikes policy, a warning would be first issued to offenders who illegally share files using peer-to-peer technology to access music, TV shows and movies free of charge. The second strike would lead to the offender's internet access being suspended; the third would cancel the offender's internet access."
British Parliament sues Australia for copyright infringement.
Do they think the ISPs will voluntarily give up a 30% plus chunk of their revenue stream?
This will fail the first time anyone encrypts their traffic. Therefore, either someone reminds them of the foolishness of their plan, they actually carry out their plan and it not surprisingly fails miserably or the worst scenario- they actually include encrypted traffic along with illegal p2p traffic regardless of whether it is actually legal or not.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
...considering the track record of the current administration in Australia http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/web-porn-filter-takes-biggest-hit/2008/02/16/1202760663247.html/.
Depends on if the government lets them raise the rates to make up for "losses due to piracy", doesn't it? Well, isn't that the argument used by the MAFIAA?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
The same happens in all prisons.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Like a virus bad ideas have a way of spreading.
Pictures -- I'm pretty sure all the pictures we download are copyrighted. Probably at least half of it being on websites that were not the express permission of the owner.
I'm pretty sure articles too, which some blogs insist on quoting in near entirety to get traffic.
Why should other mediums get special treatment under the law?
I thought it was only illegal to provide copyrighted material, not receive it?
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
According to the article, it only targets Peer to Peer technology, not FTP, HTTP or other protocols...
Which if IIRC is where it all started.
Of course, when Peer to Peer programs start using modified versions of well known protocols such as FTP and HTTP then identifying the difference between illegal and legal traffic is going to be impossible... Either that or Youtube is completely screwed.
GrpA.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
i wounder what tpg would think of this, they seem to pride them selfs on being a unfiltered, unmoderated and no blocked ports isp
anon proxy here we come...
I get him to hire one of my plants as a minimum wage monkey. Monkey violates copyright on company network and bang! No more competition. We are soooo gonna fuck the Aussies on this one, bwahahahahahaha!!
b(^_-)d
this would be policed. How is an ISP supposed to know weather what is being shared by P2P constitutes a copyright infringement or not?
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
Awesome, so if you download them to share them instead, you're A-OK!
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.
Maybe it's like Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe: "If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off by trying to introduce mandatory ISP content filtering"
What a fucking joke. It's a moronic piece of legislation to propose, and has no chance of succeeding whatsoever. In the wildly unlikely event that he can get it to pass it has zero chance of achieving its aim. Either way he's going to come out of this looking like an absolute, utter tool.
And that little populist boost he'll get from the cretins out there is going to fade away pretty bloody quickly once it's clear that he's just completely fucked the internet for the entire goddamn country.
Rudd wants to get broadband to more homes not less, and most governments know stuff like this would be wildly unpopular, and the ISPs have exactly the same financial reasons(increased monitoring costs, loss of revenue from cancelled subscriptions, potential repercussions from improper cancelations), so are just as likely to fight.
Personally I doubt even the Brits who have a much more invasive approach towards their citizens than we do are going to pass something like this, it's political suicide to try and save something that probably can't be saved.
Here's a simple work around. run uTorrent on port 21. then your data will appear to be FTP.
Next, register the DNS of your site to be ftp.companyname.com and if they complain say "yes, that's where my customers upload their high resolution nautical maps to, for my research into deep sea excavation"
Of course, I strongly suspect ISPs will work it like this:
If downloads > x then
you_are_a_pirate
end if
Clearly, they don't see it as wrong. Solution: Criminalize something that 10% of the population considers acceptable.
Gotta love that logic.
I should have used that one! Watch it! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/
How does an article about a filtering scheme introduced by the previous government support your claim that this filtering will likely go ahead? The current government has next to no track record, except in declaring the net filtering introduced by the previous government a failure.
Really, what are you trying to say and did you get an interesting moderation for the same reason as a triple breasted bearded dwarf might be considered "interesting"?
I don't therefore I'm not.
With my new, TOR-based, encrypted, PtP network, nobody will know what I'm up or downloading, or where from.
Innocent until proven guilty?
"selectively".. as are most laws these days.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Considering that the internet is becoming an absolute necessity to actually live, communicate etc, cutting of access is like saying you can't walk on the roads... to me it's starting to sound like a human rights violation. It's a necessity. In 20 years, nothing works without it. Imagine losing your bank account, having no phone, no home address... it would create a vast criminal class without ability to live a proper public life.
They are being actively promoted by a powerful international lobbying group with a huge marketing budget, which has found a very very attentive listeners in the crowd of control-freak nanny-state trotting politicians all over the world. It is a very good symbiosis for both groups -- both want the same thing - total surveillance; and the government control-freaks find it very helpful that the "intellectual property" proponents give them a good reason to introduce it.
But, actually, they are the same group of people -- or at least became one since the publishers and movie makers got into the business of political propaganda anyway. Or was it the other way around?
The basis for the article, and in fact the only actual quote from a government minister, is as follows:
"We will also examine any UK legislation on this issue [including any three-strikes policy] with particular interest," he [Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy] said. Nowhere does it mention that the Australian government is "Considering copying" UK's laws.
Because it's obviously 'sexy' at the moment to write about technology and internet related issues (Going by the number of articles to do with p2p, Facebook, YouTube etc.) these two journalists have decided to write an article with pretty much no grounding in fact - but it does have a sensationalist title (The alliteration is nice too, I'll admit) and therefore people will read it and submit it to Slashdot.
Oh and then we'll link to an article about the Australian government's attempts to stop kids looking at porn (Because that's highly relevant?). I live in Australia, and according to that article I apparently need to verify my age before visiting 'Adult sites' but a quick check shows I don't. As for this quote; "While British ISPs resisted suggestions that they act as internet police, the response may not be the same in Australia". I'm sure you guys have heard of those DMCA take down letters issued by various copyright holders to ISP's and in turn to customers? Well the biggest ISP in Australia, Telstra, which has around 50% of the market doesn't even bother forwarding those to the customer who has apparently breached copyright. It seems that Australian ISP's have a lot more respect for their customers then ISP's in Britain and America.
You still have to make a listing of the files available and searchable for each node/sharer.
Besides, if they do have a way for the files to be identified, at least to a reasonable degree of certainty, then why shouldnt we have a law like this? You can always contest it in court if you feel you have been wrongly accused.
Im serious. If we find a way to enforce copy right again, why shouldnt we? I know we like stuff to be free, but it really shouldnt be unless the person chooses to give it away.
Wait... what the fuck?
So basically they are saying that because the *IAA doesnt have enough evidence to take the suspected infringer to court, that somehow the ISPs should play Team Fucking MAFIAA: World Police and disconnect their users if they are acting suspiciously?
Thats such a stupid idea that we should immediately apply it to shoplifting! After all, the department stores know how much they are losing due to "shrinkage" - we know that equates to X shoplifters - so we just have to go and find suspicious looking people and boot them right the hell out the CBD! Bulge in your pants? One strike! Not holding a reciept for buying shit in the past hour? Two strikes! Window shopping? Three strikes and a boot up the arse!
It keeps prices down for the real customers...
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I think we need a war on this stupid "war on" meme. For music companies or journalists to suggest that the downloading of music justifies the same response as Hitler's invasion of Poland is disgusting.
I really wish that there had been a viable alternative with a sensible technology strategy, but as far as that went during the elections neither side really differed in that regard at all. At least I can nominally say "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos"
I'd only agree to this if it meant immunity to any kind of legal action. otherwise, fuck off.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
No difference to all those fake rolex watches etc., should it be a criminal offence to buy one or to have it in your possession.
Should the government make the end user liable for being the 'victim' of a fraud. Similarly those people who have been victims of phishing, a downloaded a fake copyright infringing version of their banking web site, not only does the victim have their account raided by a criminal, but the government will fine them in addition, perhaps by confiscating what remains of that bank account, as well as of course kicking them off the internet.
Of course you can not differentiate between different types of copyrighted content, so unknowingly click on a web site that contains 3 infringing photos, and they will kick you off the internet. Well if they really are going to be a bunch of fucked up phreaks, why don't they make it a criminal offence, to download infringing copyrighted content, I am totally positive that after just one month using the internet their would not be one person who has not unknowingly downloaded some infringing content, be a piece of writing, a photo, a portion of a web page design, some web page coding, or a viral video etc.
So the maroons can try to turn the whole country into a prison and oddly enough honour it's heritage as a prison colony, with a 'Rudd'y fool as the head warden.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
like mandatory military service in some countries, why not mandatory prison sentences? After all, every day there's more talk of what we can't do, can't smoke pot, can't copy files, why not?
pop another anti-depressant they tell us, fuck you!
not surprising all of this is coming from countries which first sold us the idea of "original sin"
Why don't they just rename it slashdot.org.au and get it over with?
Australia is still under the sovereignty of the Queen, so what is the problem?
chief of state:
Queen of Australia ELIZABETH II (since 6 February 1952)
represented by Governor General Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Michael JEFFERY (since 11 August 2003)
head of government:
Prime Minister Kevin RUDD (since 3 December 2007)
Deputy Prime Minister Julia GILLARD (since 3 December 2007)
cabinet:
prime minister nominates, from among members of Parliament, candidates who are subsequently sworn in by the governor general to serve as government ministers
elections:
none; the monarch is hereditary; governor general appointed by the monarch on the recommendation of the prime minister; following legislative elections, the leader of the majority party or leader of a majority coalition is sworn in as prime minister by the governor general
Ramen
Three strikes is actually a good idea for stopping infringement. It's pretty fair. It allows for mistakes to be made without them being life-ruining, while still effectively enforcing the law. So long as the methods for determining copyright infringement are effective and empirical enough, this could be quite useful.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Learn what the question mark is please, and use it.
Money for nothing, pix for free
There is no reliable way to tell in advance if content is illegal. I might be sending a (legally purchased and owned) MP3 to my mother-in-law.
This whole thing is BS.
Do you ever look forward twenty or thirty years and wonder what the world of technology will deliver to us? What it's potential is and what will actually be realized?
In the last 20 years we've gone from home computer systems with half a meg of ram or less to a worldwide network of high powered PC's in every home, evolving human interaction from e-mail, IRC, web pages, instant messages, internet radio, internet video, 3D virtual worlds, online stores, the participation of a global audience in projects ran by NASA, live news coverage from hundreds of vendors - it's impressive. And we have more to look forward to: 3D TV, space elevators, nanotechnology, advanced AI, accessible quantum computing, artificial limbs that interface with our nervous system, maybe even space travel to other worlds.
Sometimes I catch myself wondering about all the things I can't even imagine today that will come along after my death and I'll never experience. Then I think about modern day issues such as this ludicrous copyright legislation, in my home nation (UK) no less, and I wonder if in ten years time if the Internet will even be recognizable as a free, neutral foundation for furthering mankind, or will it simply be transformed into a Government regulated and observed, pay per use, pricing-tiered no-man's land destroyed by industries seeking to motivate individuals to purchase their products or works as a product of fear mongering and contorted calculations of "damages" that haven't even been shown to have occurred?
Copyright is necessary such that those who spend their lives creating works valued our societies can continue to do so. It is a balance between the needs and desires of our societies and the needs and desires of our artists, authors, and musicians. It is not a tool to be wielded by industry associations to sue individuals who can't afford to buy a dozen CDs, let alone defend themselves in court, into bankruptcy for the purposes of a public scare campaign, nor a tool to twist the laws of a society against itself solely in the interests of those agencies - those agencies who themselves are not the artists, authors, and musicians who create the works they claim to protect, and who they have recently announced they seek to pay less.
Please stop this madness. The world will suffer greatly at the hands of a small group of greedy executives and their shareholders if this nonsense continues much further down its current path.
So who decides when an infringement occurs? If privacy laws prevent ISPs from snooping on traffic (or do they?), and the main source of copyright complaints comes in the form of mass mail from industry associations, who's to verify and decide what is a "strike" and what isn't? What is the appeals process? What is cutting someone off meant to realistically achieve? And finally, what's the weather like in Sweden? I think I'd like to move there.
What the article doesn't mention:
;-)
Just hours before it was revealed that Senator Conroy has spent $85M of taxpayers money on a pr0n0graphy filter he expected 2.5 million households to rush to get off him. Only 4% took him up on it, leaving Conroy with egg all over his face. (egg? something else comes to mind...
Embarrassing story, so hours after this Rudd and Conroy announce the War on Internet Music. They may have released this to take the above story out of the news. Conroy and Rudd are both Conservative Christians.
http://tinyurl.com/27f6wt
http://tinyurl.com/2zguwp
I thought the limit on data trasfer per month is already stupid.
Encryption can fail if the government makes it illegal or establishes a way of forcing the populace to give the passwords during an investigation. Such investigation could start simply by monitoring your bandwidth usage and comparing it to that of someone who only sends mails and browses for porn from time to time.
However, there should be ways of making the such a monitoring useless. For example, a worm could be done that connects to torrent sites and download movies to random folders in your computer. The worm could accept suggestions about how to search in such a way as to make it impossible to discern if the movie it downloaded was the "infected" user's choice or simply a random popular choice.
With a portion of the population not willing to patch or kill the worm, the propagation would be brutally fast (taking into account which part of the internet population would be voluntary victims).
You'd have to hunt down the unwillingly downloaded Harry Potter latest movie or britanity spear latest... whatever she does now. However, bandwidth speed is growing fast and multimedia size is more or less constant.
that's ALOT of money the ISPs are going to miss out on.
I don't see how its possible for them to identify down loaders we will all just block the Australian ip range since almost all decent seeds are overseas due to Australia's crappy board band.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
is a war on the war on the war on meme
for real
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If not, then someone should post one to the British legislation, else those Auzies will never figure out how to copy it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Yes it should, if it can be established that a reasonable person would have thought that the watch was counterfeit (i.e. `replica' in the title of the auction, suspiciously low price,etc.), they should be prosecuted. This is no different from `possession of stolen goods' or `handling' in the UK: you cannot simply claim that you had absolutely no knowledge that the goods were stolen if it would have been obvious to a reasonable person that they could not be legitimate. The same rule could easily be applied to copyright infringement: nobody will ever prosecute you because someone posted an infringing picture on his website. However, if you download songs and movies from other users using P2P software, it is almost certainly copyright infringement.
Australia's bandwidth is sold wholesale to ISPs at a rate that makes it hard to turn a profit unless the bulk of customers don't use anything like their monthly quota. The first people tot have their access suspended will be the ones who use every last byte, which generally means the ISPs are currently losing money on those customers. The ISPs have different business models, and different demographics to their customer bases...so I imagine the quality providers with good deals and speeds will hate this sort of legislation, as their users are in the know, often nerds, and won't stand for it. But the major guys, Optus, Telstra, etc, with all the families who didn't bother shopping around in the first place and don't give two figs about copyright law, or any other tech/political issue - they'll love the opportunity to cut off all their heavy users.
HyperText Torrent Transfer Protocoal (H3TP), coming to an Internet near you!
The UK does this too, albeit currently not quite to the same degree. Cleanfeed blocks some sites and since December 2007 all ISPs must legally have a version of it in place. The list was originally intended to just include child porn sites, but according to some it has now expanded and no one other than the Home Office (including the ISPs) knows what it now covers.
This is indeed the case. I fear that this legislation is unworkable.
May I suggest that any Australian readers voice their concerns?
It is actually quite easy to find your Federal member of Parliament. Just go to this site and search your suburb. For a list of members, here is an alphabetical list, party list, list of members by state and also an electoral list.
Once you've found your member, their contact details can be found if you follow the links.
The more people who get involved, the more that politicians will listen. Don't let lobbyist groups get away with this sort of rubbish!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If you've got a copy of the Star Wars animated feature on your machine a month before it comes out in the theater I'd say you have a mouth full of chicken feathers and claiming you didn't know it wasn't out yet isn't going to fly. One of the biggest problems with the whole argument is there's a lot of different positions falling under the hat of P2P. People argue that there are legitimate uses but most of it seems to be sharing copyrighted material. Then there's others that are claiming fair use but that's murky too because fair use was never meant to be a dodge for getting around paying for materials. Then you have people that flat out don't want to pay for anything and why should they if they can download it for free? I don't know, maybe because the producers of all this content you want for free may decide to do something that pays instead of producing free content? The subject really needs to be divided up into several arguments. File sharing of non copyrighted materials isn't an issue so it's a non argument and can be excluded. Fair Use? Well Fair Use doesn't cover uploading a movie that has yet to hit the theater for your closest hundred thousand friends to download. So we are largely left with "I don't want to pay for anything" being the argument. Well since the people making said products don't want to work for free so you don't have to pay then either some one else has to pay for you or the products will cease to be produced and everyone will loose including those willing to pay. The debate is being clouded by the different issues but it really comes down to free verses pay. Pay is called capitalism, free means the government pays for content then you get what they want to produce and you pay for it with your tax dollars. So unless you want to watch documentaries on the life and times of Ronald Regan and George W Bush or hear their favorite music you might want to consider paying for music and movies you like. Socialism and Communism may sound like a free ride but you still wind up having to pay through taxes and you tend to get a lot of crap. Yes most films and music are crap these days but believe it or not it can get a lot worse.
They're going to cut illegal song downloads by 90%. So what if the technically savvy figure a way around it. Americans really have a hard time grasping the 'English' way of doing things, but it works, which is why we don't drive SUVs, why we recycle, etc. The govt makes it too bloody expensive to be a 'rebel'.
Not very fast? Most ISPs offer 24mbit ADSL2+. Much faster than most of the world.
I have my doubts about exactly that theory. I for instance am quite ignorant about brands. I wouldn't be able to make a difference between a pair of brand name sunglasses and a counterfeit one, because I simply don't know the brand names. So if I am on vacation, and my glasses break, I just go for new ones, and I would surely take a pair which I like, and where the price looks reasonable to me. I simply have no clue what brand name sunglasses are supposed to cost.
I know that we (bombarded by advertisements and brand name awareness) are supposed to know all the brand names and the associated prices. I call that bullshit. I just don't care. I never have. And I never will. I am buying functionality, not brands. If a pair of sunglasses works for me I don't care about the name that is printed on them. I wouldn't pay more if I remember an ad I saw for the name.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/15/tiscali_bpi_agreement/ is the latest story I've read about progress here in the UK.
More to the point and as I believe has probably been metioned, exactly legitimate use do they think I have for the 20 Meg connection they've sold me. (especially as they make it very clear that this is a domestic, rather than business service - usually when it's broken).
That doesn't make any sense. Firstly, it was the Rudd government that declared the porn filter a failure. If they wanted to bury the story, they could have just said it was doing great, or ignored it. Secondly, the porn filter was a Howard government initiative. Its failure doesn't leave egg on Rudd's face, if anything, it makes him look better than Howard.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If not enough people use public transport, is it correct to ban the private car? Or better to fix the public transport system instead?
I'd be surprised if they can find out who is using what IP at any given time.
If you have anything constructive and insightful to say a good person to contact would be Senator Stephen Conroy http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/senators/homepages/senators.asp?id=3L6
Umm, this might sound like a nitpick, but you forgot another not insignificant category --- legally sharing copyrighted material. Think Free software, CC licensed audio and video, etc. I download several GB every month, and I'm sure I'm not alone. People do produce things for reasons other than just money.
Just sayin' s'all...
Cogito, ergo sig.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
With all these stories in the news recently, it is no surprise that anonymous networks such as Freenet are growing rapidly. This time last year the estimated network size at any one time was about 500 - now it is about 5000.
Freenet is easy to install and set up, and all traffic is sent in encrypted UDP packets that are difficult for ISPs to fingerprint.
Files can be uploaded or downloaded completely anonymously. Even a malicious Freenet peers you are directly connected to can only guess what you are doing, since they can't be sure if you are requesting parts of files yourself or just routing them for someone else. If even this is too much risk for you, you can restrict your direct peers to people you know and trust (darknet) - you only need 10-20 peers.
If you don't know anyone else on Freenet, you can just set it to connect to random people (opennet) - both methods are part of the same Freenet.
Yes, it's an arms race. But the RIAA etc. will go for the low hanging fruit so it is wise to stay one step ahead of the crowd. Encrypted torrents will stop the ISPs snooping on you, but not RIAA investigators who can just join the torrents themselves.
Speeds are obviously slower than a fast torrent, but you can download a 700MB file in a day with a good connection. And as more people join Freenet, speeds should increase as popular files get cached in more places.
Agreed: if you want to fileshare with true anonymity, you need a fully encrypted network such as Freenet, which is already very functional and has a large filesharing community.
Torrents have no anonymity by design, even if the traffic is encrypted.
I can't help noticing the uncanny resemblance between the three-strikes rule and the three-duplicates-of-this-story rule on Slashdot. Are they by any chance related? I think we should be told.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
I just had a thought, would you get charged the raft of early termination fees that are included in every broadband contract (as far as I know)? I was with an ISP that changed its exit fees to 100% of the remaining contract (!).
"Well since the people making said products don't want to work for free"
People have been making music (good music) for thousands of years - free.
People have been painting pictures (good ones) for thousands of years - free.
People have been making films since motion picture cameras were invented - free.
You are only supporting old, fat cigar-smoking "producers" who divide their time between ripping off and porking boy bands and/or starry-eyed girl singers.
Your position is indefensible.
Take 3D cinema for example, what a great opportunity. Here's something entirely new that you can't get by downloading a movie. I paid to see Beowulf in a 3D cinema and it was fantastic. The movie itself wasn't so great, but seeing it in real 3D without the discomfort caused by the old red/blue system was well worth the price of admission. High Definition DVD's was another good concept, badly executed and made for the wrong reasons, but it's the right idea. Offer a new product people will want that can't be so easily infringed.
As for music, maybe it's time the focus went back to concerts? Bands don't make enough money from them because they have to pay a huge portion of earnings back to their record company for distribution, advertising and studio costs. The big record labels are no longer necessary. Cut them out of the picture, distribute your music world wide for free on the internet and the money you make from shows, and especially merchendise, should be enough for a comfortable living. Let radio stations play whatever they want to for a change, the best music is on the non-profit college radio stations that have this freedom. The albums themselves are just advertisement.
Copyright simply can't be enforced the way it used to be, not without breaking the technological advancements we've made in the past 2 decades. Controlling the flow of information is simply not compatible with a system designed to share information freely.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
download prince's latest opus, then the latest ball, uh, block buster, then some Microsoft product.
That will get the idiots off of the internet.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Ok, it's predictable, but it's a welcome change from the normal Slashdot jokes. PS. I'm a convict^H^H^H^H^H^H^HAustralian, and I found this funny.
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
Ok, it's predictable, but it's a welcome change from the normal Slashdot jokes.
Is it? I don't get it. Didn't we send more convicts, and for a longer time, to the Americas, and only turn to Australia when those colonials had their little revolution? My impression was the Australia is primarly populated by post-war Italian migration, at least when I went there almost everyone I met seemed Italian or Greek or something.
Given this change I'm in the middle of writing such a letter and encourage any other Aussies to do so as well, especially given Australia regularly has one of the highest two (usually along with the UK) rates of downloads - specifically U.S. TV shows which usually take a year or longer to reach our shores (if they make it at all).
As for all those /.ing computer geeks/nurds who craft web pages and have the content stolen all the time, what, fuck them too?
There is the rub, all are equal under the law, or you allow corruption to take root and start treating some differently than others. So what is the basis for that bias, those that can provide politicians with free sex, drugs, money and get them re-elected get protection and those that can't including millions of private individuals who regularly have their ideas stolen by corporations just get screwed over ?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I doubt any Australian Internet provider would accept this lying down, we're in the game of providing Internet access not playing judge-jury-executioner.
The existing Copyright Infringement provisions are sufficient, the amendments made to our Copyright Act for the US Fair Trade Agreement a few years back added a whole bunch of increased action for Copyright owners and protections for ISP's if they follow the Safe Harbour provisions.
This includes a "Repeat offender" policy, so we're already required to take action against "Repeat Offenders", which is a nice vague term, leaving it open to interpretation, meaning we can enforce such a policy in a reasonable way without loosing huge numbers of customers and still protecting ourselves from legal action from Copyright owners.
As the person who developed and maintains the system used by Primus Australia to process Copyright Infringement notices I have seen a very poor record of accuracy from the agencies that issue Copyright Infringement notices. Some are worse than others, many claim IP Addresses were sharing infringing content on P2P networks when the IP Address was not allocated, and many result in customers identified by their IP/Time Stamp evidence and sent notices are responding claiming that they were not sharing the material in the notice.
Forcing ISP's to terminate their subscribers accounts for Copyright Infringement will not only result in loss of revenue for Internet providers, but will also result in many wrongfully identified customers being terminated who will of course respond by taking action against the ISP through the Telecommunications Ombudsmen on through the courts.
That said, we also get a reasonable number of positive resolutions to copyright infringement notices that are accurate, many customers receiving these respond to say that they were not aware that sharing/downloading such material through a P2P client was illegal and claim to have removed the file and P2P client.
Of course I'm sure many of both kinds of response may have been a complete lie, but the gradual reduction of infringement notices since we introduced the automated notification system indicates it must be educating customers to some extent.
In regards to P2P and network impact, we've done the numbers and the impact isn't so bad for us, we buy all our International data at flat rates but provide it capped to customers (shaped to 80kbps after the quota is exceeded) this keeps costs fairly low, the main issue is trying to get customers to do the bulk of their downloading in times when our international links are used the least, in the off-peak times, which can be archived to a reasonable degree through plans with generous off-peak quotas and limited peak quotas.
The main cost for P2P is peering with Telstra, who charge an arm and a leg for data both to and from their network, so if a Telstra customer downloads of a Primus customer seeding a torrent, it will cost us money. Most other providers however the peering data is (almost) free.
I guess that's all I have to say about it..
Let's spend tax-payer's money to seek out and reprimand people who illegally download copyrighted works!
The best part is, these people will then either go without, or source the works the 'old fashioned' way and copy them directly from friends, or from people who charge money to put it on a blank CD/DVD with black texta scrawled across it! This way, the owners of the copyrighted will make EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY they would have anyway.
The very idea is financially unsound for tax-payers, potentially reduces the customer-base of ISPs, reducing their revenue and thus their staff, increasing unemployment (although they could get jobs in the new Anti-piracy Enforcement Agency)...
The biggest issue is that people still seem to think that every copy pirated is a lost sale. It's not! Every copy pirated is a copy that would never have been sold in the first place. Many people pay for content they want, but the market is so saturated, not everyone can buy everything that they want. Many make do with what they can afford, others wait until its cheaper, and still others pay dearly for the things they really appreciate, and next-to-nothing for those things they would care less about if they couldn't have.
And IPs (v4) aren't static!
And, are we going to punish the children in families who have a pirate downloader in their midst?! Are we to make them fall behind or drop out of school/university because someone who had their IP previously downloaded some content and it got blamed on their parents/siblings?!
This is purely and unworkable fantasy utopia dreamed up by people with money who are greedy for more money. If instantiated anywhere, it will feed money into the black market even faster than it already is!
There are many other avenues my rant has gone on in my head since reading TFS, and if this appears to be being seriously considered or, FFS, actually proposed, I will have no issues expounding them to all who listen...
jaminJay
Angry Australian
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
Oh this will really scare those Bulgarian/Cambodian/Russian hackers into behaving responsibly with respect to IP.
You miss the fact that many of us are tired of being burned by the large media companies. I can't even fathom all the money I've sunk into lousy movies and music in my lifetime. I really enjoy trying before buying. Granted, the fact that starwars is in the title these days means that the flick is likely to suck but hey maybe it doesn't. And if you watched the LOWER QUALITY version you have on your computer a month before it comes out and liked it you are more likely to go check it out on a big screen with serious sound behind it. P2P does not hurt the content creators as has been popularly asserted by people like you and the big content providers. Just look at the record box office numbers seen last summer!
The P2P fight is not about just wanting free stuff. It is about the big content providers no longer being able to sell you dreck because there is a mechanism for sifting through it.
Viva P2P and artists that actually make good things
Death to outdated business models