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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."

18 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. I just use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    aapt-get.

    aapt-get remove afact

    aapt-get install mapiratinboots

  2. Oh, just piracy? by Jack9 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Also commerce and terrorism and scientific research and banking and hacking and collective processing and ....

    --

    Often wrong but never in doubt.
    I am Jack9.
    Everyone knows me.
    1. Re:Oh, just piracy? by dominious · · Score: 4, Informative

      ...porn?

  3. 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. Re:What about Interstate Highways? by Korin43 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unlimited downloads of music, movies and games hardly implies copyright infringement. Examples: iTunes, last.fm, Microsoft's music store, Hulu, flash games, Steam...

    3. Re:What about Interstate Highways? by srjh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:What about Interstate Highways? by jonbryce · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:What about Interstate Highways? by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

  4. Frivolous lawsuit filer should pay defendant costs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    First shoot all the lawyers.

    Then shoot all the lawyers AGAIN!

  5. 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.

  6. Allergy by DaMattster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  7. Summary is wrong. AAPT are wankers. by ChameleonDave · · Score: 4, Informative

    8pm to 8am? I wish!

    I am currently on AAPT's unlimited-offpeak plan. The article summary is wrong. The offpeak period in fact begins at 2am. You can actually see this in the fine print at the bottom of the linked Youtube video.

    In passing, I'll moan about something related. Last month, we went over our onpeak limit of 20GB. Our broadband was cut off, and we had to content ourselves with dial-up speed for the rest of the month. We sighed, and thought, "oh well, at least the broadband will only be cut off from 8am till 2am. We're paying for unlimited traffic from 2am till 8am, so we'll still have that."

    I had, of course, forgotten that it was AAPT we were dealing with -- that cesspit of incompetence, greed and malice. The wankers cut us off overnight too.

    Since then, I have resolved to be careful during the day, and to download the Internet every frickin' night from 2am till 8am.

  8. 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.
  9. Re:Frivolous lawsuit filer should pay defendant co by sakdoctor · · Score: 4, Funny

    Do what you want, âcause a lawyer is free,
    YOU ARE A LAWYER!

  10. Re:having computer promotes piracy by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  11. Re:Frivolous lawsuit filer should pay defendant co by palegray.net · · Score: 4, Funny

    And fill the hole up.

    With more lawyers? I can see it now...

    "It's lawyers, all the way down."

    In other words, welcome to Hell.

    --
    512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
  12. 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.