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."
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?
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.
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.
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?