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
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.
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.
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.
So you folks down under don't have anything akin to our First Amendment? You could borrow our Constitution. We're not using it.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
It gets written into trade agreements. There's leaks about current negotiations and a lot of articles about it in past negotiations where the agreements have been published. Personally I think it's due to rampant bribery, OK then "lobbying", of the US government officials that draw up proposals for such agreements.
Think back to the Vietnam war protests. It started with a few 10's, 100's of students and then with conscription led to
Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Once the upper middle class court cases start and very expensive, well educated Australian legal teams go to work on any new laws - the laws will be shown to be legal junk or more people in the public will start to ask questions.
No amount of ASIO/police infiltration, tame gov press, internet sock puppets can keep new internet laws from been publicly questioned and challenged in open courts.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Is any part of this effort to censor the Internet driven by the will of a majority of citizens?
Nope, but this is par for the course with the Liberal government (note big L, they're actually our conservatives, well our bigger conservatives, much like the US we dont have any real left wing parties to speak of).
Since taking office on the slimmest of majorities that was only granted due to a series of dodgy preference deals, the Abbott government has been acting like they've been crowned kings and pursuing their own agenda regardless of what people want. They've started conducting a military operation with a complete media blackout, began all out attacks on our public broadcaster, almost completely destroyed the NBN and all of this against the wishes of the people.
I know three people who voted Liberal, two now regret it deeply, they said they wanted to punish the Labor party, but now they realise the only people they've punished are Australia.
The only thing Australia can hope for, is that next year we have a hostile senate as the Liberals don't have a majority there and will be depending on minor parties and independents to push their agenda through.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
There is criticism of the government owned and financed ABC and its balance, particularly since it has a charter that requires it to be balanced. This is difficult given that there are no identifiable conservatives involved in any of its prime-time news and opinion programs. A free press does not require a government funded organisation, there is considerable debate as to whether a $1.2B a year public media organisation operating across all media channels and not having to produce a profit is actually stifling any commercial competitors.
The thing with the ABC is a little tricky. Perhaps it does have a slight bias towards the left wing, largely because people on the right wing tend not to believe in the worth of a public broadcaster and therefore don't work for one. If there is a problem in balance of views at the ABC, I would say that the solution is not to cut funding/close it down/sell it off, but to encourage more journalists with right wing leanings to work there. And really, I don't think it's as bad as the right wing makes it out to be - presenters on shows like 7:30 haven't been known to pull their punches when interviewing Labor politicians.
Plus, I think it's important that there be a broadcaster who is able to show things that should be shown but don't make a compelling how-much-can-we-make-on-this argument for commercial broadcasters. And I really don't feel like the public broadcaster is stifling any commercial competitors when the volume of content on commercial broadcasters far outweighs the volume of content on the public one.
Labor claimed it was all about child porn, however, the method included total secrecy of what was being targeted, this meant that abuse of this power would be very difficult to control. You somehow missed commenting on Labor's attempts to regulate the press, completely outside of anything to do with child porn.
No matter what else happens, when you start getting into filtering the internet, abuses of that power would be very difficult to control. And since you want me to specifically comment on this, I think it is wrong for Labor to want to regulate the press. With that said, I also think that recent Labor leaderships have endured criticism of their government by the press a lot more gracefully than the current Liberal leadership has of theirs, and that Tony Abbott wanting to strike at the ABC has less to do with a concern for proper balance (I didn't see him criticise any Murdoch media for their blatant anti-Labor propaganda) and more to do with getting petty revenge on an organisation that dared to point out his government's shortcomings. But then maybe I'm biased. Who knows.
My preference is for a free internet, however, normally the courts could be used to effect orders against organisations that are breaking the law. With the internet, it is difficult for courts to extend their jurisdiction to the countries that are being used by organisations involved in the illegal distribution of materials. It's a tough problem, I'll wait for details on how they plan to enforce it.
I'll grant you that this is a bit of a difficult problem to face in the digital era, but for combating piracy, I feel the answer is to more effectively use the internet rather than restrict it. Piracy is, at its heart, a problem of service via legit channels being inadequate. While there will always be people who pirate because they're cheap bastards, for most people it's more a matter of how readily and conveniently available (and high quality) the legit thing is. When even paying for cable TV gets you the hot new TV shows a month later than the US and often edited, and bittorrent can get you it the next day and intact, this is why people pirate. Piracy is easily solved (easier than blocking all the avenues of piracy, anyway): be at least as quick and convenient as downloading.
Amazingly I was able to debate this without needing to evoke threats of violence or abus