Slashdot Mirror
Internet Censorship Back On Australian Agenda
New submitter aberglas writes "The conservative government's George Brandis wants to force ISPs to block sites that might infringe copyright. Brandis said he stood firmly on the side of content creators (a.k.a. Hollywood). Ban gross violators today, obscure ones tomorrow, porn sites, far left sites the day after..." From the article, too, this snippet: "The federal government is also considering implementing a "graduated response scheme" that could lead to consumers' internet accounts being temporarily suspended if they ignore notifications to stop downloading illegal content." Shades of the Copyright Alert System.
What have we done! We've created a monster (aka Tony Abbott). I voted the Pirate Party, myself. /Stolzy
Hell they even beat China by any means.
And since all sites 'might' or 'could' infringe copyright, the demand is only to get to an approved list operated by the media companies for everything, but further entrenching their revenue stream -- because then they'll know all ad content and subscription services belong to them.
These clowns are destroying the internet, and the rights of everyone in order to ensure their rights could never possibly be violated.
And I fear there's no sign of governments pushing back and telling them to piss up a rope.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why not just block access altogether? Someone may do something illegal. Better take it away completely.
My gut instinct says that very rarely do people in the public eye follow totally altruistic agendas, particularly when it comes to issues like this that have little to do with the common good. If you dig deep enough you can find special interest trails that more often than not uncover these people's true motivators. Just follow the money.
I was never at all fond of Tony Abbott, but since he's come into power I've come to fucking detest him and everything he stands for. I hope he gets knifed for the Liberal leadership before long.
That's not censorship !! THIS is censorship !!
http://goat.cx/
!!
What does a page full of adorable puppies have to do with censorship?
Given there is no law _against_ internet censorship, these people can try, try, trytrytrytrytry again until they can ram the law through. Maybe tack it onto a huge spending bill. The fact is, _eventually_, it _will_ happen.
The problem is that there's nothing preventing it. They need to enact a law saying that there will be _no_ internet censorship in this manner, to prevent attempts to inflict this sort of law upon the populace.
For those of you not familiar with Aus politics...
A mainstream conspiracy theory is that News Corp promoted regime change at last year's federal election due to the previous policy on a National Broadband Network. Conservatives successfully argued that the only people needing the bandwidth of a fibre-optic network would be downloaders of illegally-sourced movies. So with ageing copper ADSL, the only hope of accessing 2160i content in the next two decades would be through Murdoch's cable service.
I just hope he gets knifed.
Let's just call a spade a spade, eh?
They're evil corporate worshipping scum who have just ripped off the Tea Party's own unique brand of insanity.
They don't care about anybody but themselves and their buddies in business, they're all "in on it".
We're going to try it again even though anyone who knows about IT has said the internet is designed to route around exactly this sort of problem. But, there is money to be spent on it, so that counts as job creation.
What will Clarke and Dawe say?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Whenever you see "lets fight copyright infringement" what you really are seeing is "let's censor things we don't like under the guise of copyright protection"
Same thing that happens when new anti-childporn laws come out. "Protect the children", weeks after it's law, children are being treated as sex offenders for sexting pictures of themselves to themselves.
We need to draw the line somewhere. I'm all for going after the source of infringement (those uploading it) because there is a very clear case that there is no way you could not know you're doing something illegal when you upload copyrighted material to sites like youtube, imgur, funnyjunk, tumblr, etc
But the punishment needs to fit the crime. If someone has uploaded infringing material, then the file sharer is guilty of exactly one copy of sharing. If they are seeding it on bittorrent then they are guilty of sharing the content X many times for how many complete copies appear over Y time. 10 people seeding, then every seeder is guilty of exactly 1 upload, since bittorrents very nature trades pieces of the file until complete. You can't go to a torrent listing and go, this file was downloaded 100,000 times and sue every person who downloaded one piece of it 100,000 times, because a good 90% of the people who download things aren't sharing complete copies. Someone seeding for 30 seconds has not shared one complete copy any more than someone playing 30 seconds of a video or music clip falls under fair use. That goes back to the "substantial portion" argument.
Like legally framed, people who knowingly seed torrents are guilty of copyright infringement. People who download them it may be questionable since they may not be be aware that they are sharing the file (eg MEGA) by whatever mechanism they are downloading it with.
On the flipside you have sites like youporn/redtube and the various "watchanime/watchcartoons" online sites where the site clearly has a way of tracking who's downloading the video, but it's the people uploading it who are guilty of the copyright infringement. The MPAA already has ways of having these sites remove videos, and users will continue to do it anyway. Go after those people, since they clearly want to be punished.
Why not slap everyone who downloads with fines? Because we don't know that a file was actually downloaded. Best case for hollywood, riaa, and video game companies is prove that they've re-shared the file to actually impose fines. Anyone who hasn't reshared the file, for all we know deleted the file without even watching it, so it's a dubious question if any infringement took place at that IP address.
What about small-case infringement, like data ripped from behind paywalls? I don't see any of these government laws doing anything to protect these sites. Best they can do is file the same DMCA like requests to servers located in countries that understand English. A lot of good that does when the content is stored in Russia or China. Tiny image files are much quickly dispersed and unable to be stopped.
Come on Aussies! Your ancestors fought Crocodiles, Spiders, and Aboriginals so that you would have a reasonable amount of "freedom" on your prison continent. What would Mel Gibson think of you now? Now imagine Mel with his face painted blue, and he's riding around on a Wallaby, and he's instructing you to march to Sydney, your capital.
Mel (with an Irish accent):
"You are not slaves to the American media machine! You are better than that! Hollywood doesn't benefit us! We gave them Mad Max, and they gave us Spring Breakers! We gave them Crocodile Dundee, Yahoo Serious, They take everything from Australia, and in return you get to see the Transformers in 3D. Well I'm not going to take it anymore. You can stay and you can vote, but your votes won't be counted. I'm heading to Hollywood to meet the King of the MPAA, and I'm going to tell him 'SOD OFF!'. Who's with me?!?!?"
My Dear Antipodean Friends,
Please stop taking advice from Americans, or that horrible cable lich of yours, and try electing somewhat less dangerous animals to office. Maybe one of your horrid spiders, with the lethal venom and all the hideous staring eyes. It may have somewhat draconian positions on voter envenomation; but I assure you that it will be substantially stronger on civil liberties and copyright issues.
Why does the left always resort to abuse and threats of violence?
Labor proposed to ban sites while keeping the reason and the site address secret, it also proposed government regulation of the free press and the ability to control the contents of blogs with readership of a few thousand hits a month.
Brandis is proposing being able to shut down sites that illegally share copyrighted material. It's hardly in the same league.
Why is everyone in such a rush to spend huge wads of money and violate privacy to protect American Copyright industry interests? When will the world stand up to the US?
Seems to me that simple proxy or encryption usage will prevent this anyways. Don't the Aussies have better things to spend money on, like sourcing more fresh water or expanding internet coverage? Seems priorities are screwy if they are willing to go through all of this effort. I guess the corruption knows no boarders.
I'm a self-employed fiction writer, and an Australian, my answer to this is:
No. Fuck off.
My longer answer is:
Why copyright infringement, and why Hollywood? Why do they deserve protection?
I'm David Adams. I've written and published 30+ books across various pen names and platforms, including compendiums, omnibuses, etc. I self-publish and it's been my livelihood for 17 months. I'm no Hugh Howey but I do okay.
Every single time that copyright infringement comes up, it's always in the context of Hollywood. Indie writers, singers, artists, producers... we never get a single mention. It's always all about Hollywood. Every time a tariff is discussed, a new law is proposed, it's always protecting a US industry explicitly. I would never see any money from any of the protection schemes suggested by my elected representatives, and if there's not direct funding involved, the suggested courses of action would only ever hurt me.
My questions for Mr. Brandis, not that he gives a flying fuck about me, are:
- Why Hollywood? Why are you not helping out our local artists? Is it because we don't donate flaming dump-trucks full of money to your re-election campaigns, and if so, don't you feel that you're actively selling out your local entertainment industries? Shouldn't you be representing *my* interests?
- Why are you focusing on copyright infringement, something I give zero fucks about and even actively encourage? if you don't buy my book, I'd rather you got it from The Pirate Bay than passed on it, and I make lots of books free to encourage their proliferation anyway. Why fix something that's not broken?
- As TFS and TFA indicate, this power is sweeping and applies to a lot more than just copyright. The last time the Federal Government tried this, under the banner of child pornography, it was shown (when the list was inevitably leaked) that many more websites were being blocked than simply child fiddling. Innocuous, offensive (but legal), personal grudges... the works. I struggle to believe that this time would be any different, and such blocks are trivial to bypass anyway. Why would you support a system that's fundamentally broken?
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Is any part of this effort to censor the Internet driven by the will of a majority of citizens? How about the effort to create massive surveillance regimes? Is that supported by the consent of the governed?
Make no mistake, censorship is a mechanism for redistributing wealth and power upward. That seems to be the reason the governments of superpowers do anything these days.
And also, be aware that if the merger of Comcast and Time Warner goes through, it will have the same effect. For the same reasons.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, Australian University and Australian coverage that this sort of approach doesn't work:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/09/09/2316211/research-shows-three-strikes-anti-piracy-laws-dont-work
It does nothing to address the fact that the "content creators" are yet to provide a comprehensively better approach here. Steam won over a number of the gaming folk. Netflix comprises a huge amount of US internet traffic. There aren't any great options explicitly available to Australia. We have download caps (that are getting better if you're in the right places) to contend with too.
We've seen implications that these internet filters will be used to quietly block sites beyond their scope. The big problem is that now there have been suggestions of internet filtering in some form from both Labor and the Coalition. That doesn't bode well for us...
Because the ".cx" domain was under the control of the Australian government when the Liberal party were last in charge of the country.
stop the download - yeah, that'll work.
a bunch of clowns this lot are.
Why would a prison camp need its own top-level domain? :)
I can never imagine a day where voting in a Liberal government will be a good idea. Just thinking about the proportion of Australians who could actually bring themselves to do so makes me sick. Friends don't let friends vote Liberal.
Damn, I have mod points but have already posted on this story.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
We need to keep in contact with Murdoch, there's still a few of you on the outside listening to BBC, et-al.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There is no surprise on my part. Dodgy West Island politicians cowtowing to the whims of corrupt Seppo film studios and equaly corrupt recording companies. I suspect the only reason that Abort and his cronies are doing this is because they are worried that it will take a few cents out of their pockets, not because it, according to the "industry" bullshit, would benefit the artists because we know just how those companies have squeezed every single fraction of a cent the can from the artists and then discrarded then like a used tissue once they are wrung dry. Let us not forget how avaricious politicians can be.
Did the Australian government stop to ask why they might be pirating so much? Perhaps the country has gotten a little tired of paying $100 (AUS) a month watch American TV shows 6 months to a year after their release.
Lack of legal access to content at a fair price in this globalised world isn't working. Australia is a diverse nation, I have friends living there and I'm from Britain. I would imagine that they're getting annoyed having to wait all the time for new releases. I've heard of series being delayed for longer than a year before now and there's not even any translating to do. The video games market was at one time just as bad, games delayed by overly strict censorship, like having to remove all the gore from Left 4 Dead 2.
For any Non-Australians reading this:
The current Australian goverment is basically the mating bewtween the most obnoxious tea party personality and a psycho like dick cheney.
By past precedent: It will probably take a few years (another election term) for the 'average joe' over here to vote them out, meanwhile they'll wreck the country.
We're dealing with rigged market capitalism, mining industry has bought out the government big time, and yes the murdoch press is the dominant force here that does not cover news more like 'sifts through the news for what it wants' and adds a bit of its own 'news' to the mix.
Basically the high point of Australian politics over the last 10 years was 2007-2008 period. We were discussing an emmissions trading scheme, versus carbon tax (liberal position at the time). The government went into debt to avoid a recession (it provided a stimulus which worked 'well enough') Eg: our building sector would have gone under because for a period of 6 months there was no private infrastructure projects, it was all public construction contracts that kept it afloat.
On a larger note the 'debt' was tiny in proportion to GDP and many economists argue we should stay in defecit (being a self issuing currency) for the next ~10 years because we have a lot of 'hidden employment' and an 'output gap'. In short previous government was not fantastic but they were discussing issues like mining tax increases to re-balance the economy. Eg: manufcaturing, science, education, farming, tourism, commercial sectors have all been in trouble for a while.
Anyway that 'mining tax' was stopped in part by a huge campaign from conservatives whom (dont forget one person controls most of the media over here) ran a huge mis-information/scare campaign series of advertisements saying any new tax would make mining industry go broke. (obviously the accounting and precedents for rates of tax on mining around the world showed otherwise. But as i said you wont believe how insular Australia is).
Fast foward to election 2013 Liberal party got into power by about 30,000 aggregate votes (though it was distributed such that labour lost several seats in our parlement.)
This media hysteria/campaign seems to continue today from the time of the mining tax debate.
The 'mainstream media' basically attacks anything that doesn't suit the liberal agenda. They are ramping up their campaign on the unemployed, low income groups, the remaining impartial media body 'ABC', the broadband network, scientists, asylum seekers. There is a lot of 'trial by media' here and hypocricy does not seem to matter. Ill borrow the 'double think' term as its an apt metaphor for whats going on.
The broadband network they are scrapping: If one were to follow the money or the focus groups it looks like its not a conspiracy at all just rather a way that Liberal party implements its policies. (current policies are to destroy things)
I would hazard a guess that their true rationale for doing it would be:
*Murdoch wants to monopolise all telecommunications and a faster internet will be a big threat to his own network. Why pay for fox tv when you can watch super low cost streaming etc.
*Liberals believe in small government (or non existant). Its their ideology. And would rather have a public project crash and burn (especially if initiated by their opposition). Make it look like a waste of tax payers money. Then offer a 'user pays' privately developed solution. (most of which end up with the same people on the ground implementing it but cost at least double versus the government funded option). Note: The current opposition Labour are also guilty of this but to the nth degree less so because they are supposed to be the left wing pary over here.
This is all about the TPP and Murdoch. Catering to US and commercial interests.
You are dreaming if you think censorship is not already happening. On return from another country a friend tried to access sites he routinely used in China and found they are blocked in Canada. Freedom of speech is dead.
To insure that people have access to great entertainment, we insure that the creators of great entertainment are fairly compensated - so we must destroy the greatest means of distributing content ever invented.
------
Or, we could design a system of tagging content that allows it's distribution to be monitored and recorded, making it easy for creators of edited content to incorporate a fair tagging of how much of others' content went into their work. Any new content for which the creator wishes to be paid would be submitted to a registration and review site, to be assigned a registered tag.
Any content for which the creator doesn't want to be paid could be uploaded, and the storage provider would be required to assign it an unregistered tag. If the unregistered content became popular enough, it would be reviewed to determine if it contained the untagged work of other creators - but only to insure fair distribution of fees. ALL content uploaded can be used by anyone. If you don't want everyone to get it, encrypt it.
Money would be collected as fees on internet users, at two levels: Full fee - no restrictions on content consumption, TBD whether paid in proportion to amount of content consumed or flat fee. No fee - all tagged content is stripped except tiny fragments considered "fair use" (such as quotes, links to content, maybe images shrunken to no more than 256x144 pixels, video represented as a single frame from the original, etc).
Rupert Murdoch is the real government of Australia, and here are his policies:
1. Ruining the performance of the national broadband network to stop it becoming an IPTV platform which could hurt Foxtel sales.
2. Attacks on the ABC news service.
3. Copyright crackdown, drives more people to his Foxtel service to get Game of Thrones.
All these things are his payment for supporting the Abbot election in his newspapers.
On the contrary it was rather prescient of him to manage to migrate as a 12yo with his parents in anticipation of an alternate vector into Hollywood.
By the way the level of stupid on this topic seems to be even below slashdot's normal standards.
Irish accent? Weren't there enough clues in the movie about where it was based?
Sydney isn't the capital of Australia, in fact the capital needed to be further than 100miles from Sydney as part of the agreement between the states during Australian federation.
It's probably worth noting that at one point (and probably still), Australia was the number one downloader of TV shows in the world.
That being said, we're constantly delayed waiting for current seasons of shows to be played on our free-to-air stations.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
Tony Abbott is the minister for women, and as tony knows, women don't understand technology, so he doesn't have to either. Which is why he left a moron in charge of technology, a Mr Brandis. Seeing as the current opposition's Mr conroy was pushing very hard for the exact same thing (even before other countries than china were installing it), and no R18+ video games, it seems we have safe port.