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Australian ISPs Will Be Forced To Block (Some) Pirate Websites

angry tapir writes: Senators representing Australia's two main political blocs have issued a report backing a bill that will allow copyright holders to apply for a court order forcing ISPs to block access to piracy-linked websites. The proposed law has met with a less-than-enthusiastic from anti-censorship activists and consumer advocates. Even the federal parliament's human rights committee has been concerned about whether the law is a proportionate response to piracy.

2 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So every search engine will soon be blocked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    here is no such thing as a "pirate website"! Violations of copyright law are not "piracy"! Calling copyright violators "pirates" is just the copyright holders attempt to make the crime of copyright violation seem much worse than it is in reality.

    Yes, copyright violation is a crime, however copyright has been extended extremely far beyond any reasonable time period. What is reasonable? 5 years is reasonable. Life+75 years is totally friggin stupid! Copyright has been extremely abused, and copyright holders are trying to eliminate Fair Use and Right of First Sale as well. What copyright holders really want is for us to pay a fee each time we read a book or ebook, listen to a song, or watch a movie or tv show that we have already paid for.

    Copyright infringement occurs mostly because copyright holders want to create artificial scarcity of their products to get higher prices. In other words, they want to make it harder to get their products and fool people into paying more than they should have to and/or get people to accept DRM, or other unreasonable conditions on their purchase and/or use of said products.

    The truth is that electronic copies of books, music, and video are extremely inexpensive to produce, store, and distribute over the Internet. In reality both the content creators, and consumers are being screwed by the middlemen, the publishers, RIAA (big music labels), and MPAA (hollyweed). These middlemen take great advantage of everyone and keep the lion's share of the profits.

      And more and more both content creators and consumers are realizing that the middlemen are parasites that serve no useful function any more. They just steal from everyone else involved to the great detriment of both content creators and consumers alike.

  2. Re:VPN by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The man is a consumate politician...

    You are describing Tony, Malcolm has two things the rest of the LNP ministers lack, a brain and a heart.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.