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Legal Group Says Unlimited Broadband Promotes Piracy

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-to-mention-unrestrained-tweeting dept.

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."

5 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. What about Interstate Highways? by meerling · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...)

    >^_^<

    1. Re:What about Interstate Highways? by AmigaHeretic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have to agree with this.

      Take torrents, people use them for sharing data. Now probably 90% of the traffic is illegal in some way.

      Now take the roads on my way to work. 90% of the people are doing something illegal on the roads. Usually that is speeding, of course some people are transporting drugs etc.

      So 90% of the population breaks the law when using the road. 90% of people break the law when using torrents.

      Does that mean we should get rid of roads?

  2. No different than Hard Drive advertising by joeflies · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:having computer promotes piracy by icebike · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:Jesus, he's right. by mlts · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.