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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."
They make it much easier, faster, and cheaper to smuggle goods and other illegal activities across state lines.
Obviously they were made to promote such illegal activities...
(yes, that's sarcasm, and so is this...)
>^_^<
Consumers don't understand what a terrabyte is. They do understand that if it holds hundreds of thousands of songs, then it must be huge though. So hard drive manufacturers often advertise how many songs, movies etc a hard drive can hold. It never said that you should be filling it with illegal music or movies, even though most people don't legally have a terrabyte of music. It's more or less to convey massive size to someone who doesn't understand what the technical metric measures out to. So if australia's got a problem with the ISP, let's see them apply that rule evenly and ban hard drives too.
There have been some cases such as the release of The Man From Earth where online piracy led to wide spread sales of the film.
The director himself posted on several scene release sites and setup a paypal account where people who liked his movie could either donate a small amount or pre-order the dvd.
Cases like this are far from common but I can see where this might be the future of entertainment.
Surely if I like something enough and someone makes it easy for me to throw a few dollars to the people actually involved in the making of said entertainment instead of a greedy corporation I'm down with it.
You can't take the sky from me.
Religion, Dictators, and Kings have power of live and death over you. That they "Eventually Failed" was small consolation to the millions they put to the Sword, the Guillotine, and the Gallows.
RIAA/MPAA are on a death march. Their own. They just don't realize it yet.
And they will take intellectual property with them. The backlash will be rather sever, when the sheeple wake up and realize that you can't have a fast computer because some one in a far off land wrote a song.
Eventually, it will be necessary for society to roll it all back. Copyrights, Patents, the whole nine yards.
Compose a song, sing a song, write a book: You have 4 years, then its public domain. Invent warp drive: Ok, 7 years. Sorry, we can't wait for you to die in order to use the product of your brain. We birthed you, we fed you, we educated you, you owe us.!!
Don't want to sing a song under that scenario? Fine. We will get someone else. People have been producing music far longer than they have been paid for it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
"I think some people forget that there is an endless amount of freely playable, listenable and viewable content on the web...."
I think they are well aware of it, and want to nip it in the bud by effectively outlawing it and restoring their position as the only distributors of content. While they might be genuinely concerned about piracy, I think they also realise that this is also a prime opportunity to make a land grab for all internet content.
This reminds me of a time way back when 14.4k was common (yes, it was a relative eon ago). A certain ISP I happened to bump into viewed that 9600 bps or higher actually encouraged warez transfers. So, this ISP didn't just just limit modem speed to 2400bps, but threatened to remove the account of any user who asked why it was done, because "normal, law abiding" people checking E-mail or using Netscape using Trumpet Winsock and Eudora never needed any more than that. They even viewed that the artifical limits on bps also discouraged hackers from war-dialing their modem bank.
This stuff is SSDD, except that the technology has moved from dialup to broadband.
The first honest comment in this whole section.
I am a pirate. And I think it is very improbable that all the people ranting about how they dare to call you pirates really never pirate anything.
I can honestly say I downloaded more less-than-legal content on an 1.5mb/s ADSL connection than I ever have on my 25mb/s cable connection. Why? Because I had ADSL back when I was in high school and was dirt broke. $50 bucks for a video game back then seemed more like a rip off than it does now simply because I now have disposable income. Now that I have money, I actually use pay services such as Netflix, Napster, and Steam. It's less of a matter that I want high bandwidth so I can download illegal files faster, it's more so I can download the files I legally purchase faster.
Just my $0.02.
Beyond the advertising, there is the concern that the only "legal" ways to downl... er, "licence" video and audio content are streaming, requiring you to be physically present to see the ads.
AAPT's service, by only providing unmetered downloads in off-peak hours, encourages the last thing Big Media wants, and I mean ever. "time shifting" and local archival.
Remember, copyright isn't about whether or not you have paid for the content. Not at the core. Instead, it's all about control. Big Media will never sell control, control over how media is consumed guarantees them future revenue.
Big Media wants to control where and how the content exists, they will never allow you to download a copy you can archive or backup. They should always be the only source, and you have to come back to them to see it again, even in circumstances when that means not having to pay every time. When you are done watching it, they never want you to have a copy lying around that could exist after Big Media decides the old content is competing with new content. Big Media gets giddy thinking about old CD's and DVD's that they illegalize your power to "back up" getting scratched and unusable.
Thus, it is understandable why the strategy of transferring data off-peak in order to conserve precious network resources would threaten the basic business model of copyright. The goal of conserving actually scarce resources using real economic strategy will always conflict at the core with the made up game of conserving artificially scarce copyrighted resources for artificially inflated profit.
So, that's what I make of this situation. All marketing aside, copyright holders have a vested interest to prevent us from time-shifting. To prevent us from downloading now and watching later, even when it balances strained network load. Consumers must be online, downloading content realtime. Their every pause, fast forward and rewind and channel change recorded. They must be attached directly to the teat. Then, and only then, can Big Media erase under-selling content from history ensuring noone will have a copy archived.
So yeah, tell me again how downloading content makes me a selfish ingrate?
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.