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Studios' Oz Power-Grab Revealed
Xiroth writes "More details are beginning to come out about the lawsuit launched by film studios in Australia. According to law experts familiar with the case, the studios seek to force the ISPs to become 'police, judge, and executioner,' effectively giving the studios the legal clout to switch off ISP customers' internet connection at will. Apparently the ISP iiNet is the unlucky victim for the test case as, unlike other ISPs, they refused to pass on infringement notices to their customers."
They're one of the better ISP's yeah. I hate their adds though!
Internode and iiNet are the two awesome ISPs in this country, although there are lots of smaller ones. You'll want to avoid the ISPs that charge $180/GB on any of their plans for excess usage such as Telstra, Dodo or Optus. This is not a typo. That's 180 Australian Dollars for every Gigabyte you go over your allowance. For example, Optus's 'Yes Fusion $79 plan comes with 4 GB and $150 for every Gigabyte over that. Needless to say, they've got their had stuck up so far their own bottom that they can see daylight through their own ears. But even they completely oppose the plan.
A certain Mark Newton who works for Internode is also an extremely outspoken critic of the censorship plan. But Telstra, iiNet and Internode, likely 3 out of the biggest 5 ISPs all have important people saying that the filtering won't work.
Broadband Choice is an excellent overview of the choices out there. Check out Whirlpool if you want to know more about the situation.
> What I'm wondering is why iiNet is the *only* ISP getting sued.
Because they stood up to the studios. Rather than kicking people offline, they forwarded the complaints to the cops because they had no intention of pretending to be policemen.
The summary is inaccurate on that point: they did NOT ignore the complaints. In fact, there are police in the same building as them, so they forwarded all those complaints over to them. The fact that the police did nothing is another matter, but perfectly understandable given the kind of "evidence" they're usually supplied with, especially when there are more important crimes to prosecute.
Anyhow, the studios obviously want to make an example out of the only ISP who isn't willing to play along with their power grabs in order to convince the others to be more compliant.
Isn't Australia supposed to be all European open and sophisticated, unlike us puritanical Americans?
Definitely not... Australia is VERY Americanised. They even do that weird short "a" in words that are pronounced elsewhere with a long "a" (words like "dance", "chance", "plant", "advance" etc). You can think of Australia as basically just another collection of US states but a bit more laid back (read: "lazy") and with some strange expressions/sayings and far too many poisonous animals.
Oddly, the next door neighbour, New Zealand, is MUCH more European.
I'm a New Zealander that lived in Australia for 6 years and different parts of Europe for 4 so far (living in Germany at the moment), and I've also visited the US for work on quite a few occasions, so I'm not just "assuming" things here - these comments are based on my experience of the places. They ARE just my personal experience and opinions though - your experiences may differ!
The closest relationships in culture/"feel" that I've noticed are between cities rather than countries though:
There are places that break this mould though... off the top of my head:
Note #1: Personally I prefer NZ/EU culture rather than US/AU, but it really is a matter of what you prefer... if you like EU, you'll probably like most of NZ; if you like US, you'll probably like most of AU.
Note #2: When I say "EU", "Europe" or "European" in this post, I'm more or less referring to Western, Northern and Central Europe, and excluding southern Europe a bit... the culture in places like Spain, Italy and even the south of France tends to be quite different in a lot of ways.
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