Slashdot Mirror
Legal Group Says Unlimited Broadband Promotes Piracy
bennyboy64 writes "Unlimited broadband plans are all too familiar in many countries; in Australia they're scarce. One ISP offering such a plan between the hours of 8pm and 8am, AAPT, is being looked at as a matter of high interest by a legal group representing the interests of the global film industry, AFACT (the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft). It said AAPT was encouraging users to download copyrighted material. AAPT's advertising states: 'If you want unlimited music, unlimited games and unlimited movies — get unlimited off-peak broadband downloads from AAPT.' AFACT executive director Adrianne Pecotic said: 'In the context of the AAPT promotion, we have a concern that it could be misconstrued to promote illegal downloads and that's something that we'd like clarified.' AFACT is currently involved in what will be a landmark court case with Australian ISP iiNet. It recently claimed in court proceedings that there was a link between iiNet upgrading the service plans of heavy Internet users and the proliferation of film piracy."
People want to pirate. Get over it. It's not going to stop.
If you're a dick about it, you might convince people who would otherwise pay you some of the time to pay you none of the time. That's it.
Let's go back to dialup. That will be so much better for Hollywood et al. And obviously what buys more Cristal for illiterate scumbags with hot tubs in their stretch Hummers is of Paramount Fucking Concern.
I've got an allergy to bullshit. Seems like the telecom companies will stoop to any low just to be able to use bandwidth caps, throttling, and/or anti-network neutrality actions. This positively disgusts me!! Software piracy will not be stopped by this. Perhaps, it will only be impacted by a very, very small margin. Instead of coming to their collective senses that they just need to upgrade the damn network to handle the bandwidth, they piddle on to find any excuse not to spend money towards upgrades. They tout such speeds as 20M down. Whoop tee doo! In Japan they have 100MB symmetric broadband. Why does America, Canda, Australia, and England not want to keep wup with modern high speed broadband as defined by Japan?
how about cars in-general, they let you carry hundreds if not thousands of pounds of illegal things so they promote the activity to
First let me say that I agree with you. Second, it looks like their beef was with how the isp advertised it. The implication being that any licensing charges associated with music, games and video would make it effectively impossible to make use of all that the isp was offering *legally*. But it is like you said, they *could* use it for those purposes but that doesn't mean that the risk outweighs everything else the internet user could do with the bandwidth.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I think some people forget that there is an endless amount of freely playable, listenable and viewable content on the web....
And one doesn't have to violate copyright to enjoy it.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Unlimited downloads of music, movies and games hardly implies copyright infringement. Examples: iTunes, last.fm, Microsoft's music store, Hulu, flash games, Steam...
Wow, you almost said something pointed there.
As a matter of fact, "having computer promotes piracy" is kinda right. I'll clean it up for you though:
having easy and regular access to copying machines makes copyright law seem evil and wrong, and ignoring it seems just.
There ya go.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's also an increasing number of bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead who have legally released their own material for free online.
And the sky didn't fall in.
But it's not "Australia" that has a problem with it, just an overly loud special interest group that wants to fuck over the other 99.9% of the population to their insane demands and with the $$$ and lawyers for it too.
Forget about tarring and feathering tax collectors, these groups are even worse and that punishment would be too kind!
In Britain, a pretty large proportion of bandwidth is used for iPlayer downloads, which are legal. Youtube is also very popular, and is mostly legal - they have a royalty agreement with the MCPS.
Most people who don't read slashdot find it very difficult to use peer to peer software and to find reliable downloads that actually are what they say they are without any trojans added.
What that says about human nature [...]
It says much more about the laws than the people.
It is not some mickey mouse musician trade organizations that are moving us closer to a dictatorship, it is people like you.
...a dictatorship? As a result of Mickey Mouse or the Pirates of the Boston Tea Party? And that puts us at the mercy of a despotic autocracy ?
What a drama queen, scooby doo. Turn off your talk radio. This is sounding like a cartoon idiocracy.
That really isn't a fair comparison. This is about using and abusing the many ways to understand "unlimited", just like many ISPs used it to limit bandwidth and claim it was still unlimited because you were connected 24/7. In this case, specifically that unlimited can be interpreted to mean "any song" and not "as much as you want". If they had said "Downlaod the latest Hollywood blockbusters with our new Unlimited Internet" then it'd quite clearly be foul play because it doesn't actually provide that. One of the reasons Grokster was so beaten in the 9-0 supreme court ruling if I recall correctly, is that they directly told you you'd be getting content that was there illegally. The same would an ISP be, so they have to define their "unlimited" wisely.
That said, it does not matter as bandwidth will increase regardless of promotions. It's not promotions that have made my internet speed go up ~300 times in the last decade. Nor is it promotions that means one mid-size tower with 5x2TB disks can store a library of congress. Soon we'll have enough bandwidth and storage that it's like tap water. Want something? Well your 1Gb/s+ connections draws a long sigh, and you have it. I'm already no longer a 24/7 bandwidth hog with this 20Mbit connection - and yes, 2.2MB/s actual download - because I see no point. I would never get around to watching/listening/play everything I could download. That wouldn't fundamentally change if I got a gigabit connecion. I'd get things faster but I'd still have no means to consume 1Gb/s of information. Not even streamed QuadHD super-BluRays.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's largely what I came in here to say. It may be true that really fast unlimited Internet access makes it easier and more convenient to engage in certain kinds of illegitimate behavior, but it also makes it easier to engage in lots of legitimate and useful behavior.
In this case, it may be true that unlimited broadband will hurt media companies by making piracy easier, but it could also help their businesses by opening up all kinds of new business opportunities. The problem they're having seems to be that they're dragging their feet on new business opportunities.
My big question is, who's paying this "legal group"? Is it the record companies who are trying to keep their old business models? Or is it the ISPs who are looking for an excuse to not provide good service?
Unlimited freedom promotes abuse of freedom!!!
And the Grateful Dead, who got the idea from old bluegrass musicians. Free music has been around a lot longer than the internet. The internet just makes it so much better.
Haha, it's funny when people say "nuh, not only can piracy walk down this street, so also can free or independently produced content!"
All the while Big Media execs are going "tomaytoe, tomahtoe.."
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
It doesn't ENCOURAGE piracy, the converse is true, though. Bandwidth limits DISCOURAGE piracy, because you use up all your bandwidth. The fact that the converse is true does not imply that this statement is true, however. A common logical fallacy.
Content providers will always act as if there is no legitimate use for the internet besides commercial offerings. Not really surprising....
Good-bye
You're dealing with the same mindset that killed what would have been the most profitable online venture in history. The death of the original Napster showed us that their interest is not financial, but rather a matter of control.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.