You’re Doing it Wrong Brandis.

It seems you can’t go a week without reading at least one article about how us Australians are filthy pirates, depriving the poor rights holders of their hard earned dollars. Whilst the coverage has become a lot more balanced in recent times, mostly thanks to the support of some of the higher up execs in places like HBO, it still seems that Australia’s political landscape is tilted in the wrong direction. For the most part it’s all been postering and bluster but recent statements from our new attorney-general have brought the possibility of draconian and ineffectual piracy control schemes closer to reality. Indeed it seems that rather than tackle the root cause of the issue, I.E. providing a service that’s competitive with what the pirates provide, rights holders are still only interested in protecting their out-dated business models.

George Brandis recently announced that the government would be looking to bring in anti-piracy policies as early as this week which, predictably, sparked outrage among the wider Internet community. The potential policies are the usual suspects we’ve seen bandied about in other countries, things like three strikes laws, taking down sites linking to infringing material and outright blocking larger “infringement enabling” websites. The issues with all these systems are well known and all of them have proved to be vastly ineffective in curbing the amount of piracy that occurs. Worst still Brandis’ rhetoric on the matter shows a complete lack of understanding of the issue at hand: Australian’s don’t have access to a viable alternative. Whilst I’m sure none of his policies will make it through the senate I do worry about people in his position of power making decisions without considering both sides of the piracy equation.

It’s been shown that some of the worst pirates are also the ones spending the most money on content showing that it’s not an issue with wanting something for free. The primary motivator for many pirates is convenience and in this case the legitimate alternative falls far short of what the alternatives provide. You don’t have to look far for evidence of this, just take Steam which has converted many a pirate into paying customers in regions that were once considered impossible to turn a profit in. Piracy rates in Australia will remain high until a solid competitor appears in this space as every entry thus far has proved to be much less than ideal. It’s not like there’s a technical limitation preventing this either, you can use a DNS service to get around the blocking many of the services use, it all comes down to the rights holder’s desire to not change their business model for the digital age.

Indeed the measures proposed are reflective of that stance as whilst they might have worked in the past (shutting down a bootleg CD seller pretty much guarantees that source is gone) they simply don’t function in the Internet age. Blocking websites, no matter what level you do it at, is an incredibly easy thing to work around, so much so that there’s browser extensions to do it for you. With most of those sites not being hosted in Australia the power for Australian ISPs to do anything about them is limited and even then most of them are seconds away from being replicated somewhere else. The Three Strikes style laws are by far the worst as they’re open to wide abuse, usually without little recourse. Whilst this does open up the opportunity for some fun shenanigans (it wouldn’t take much to get every politicians Internet taken down) it’s far better for them to not exist in the first place.

Undoubtedly this situation has arisen due to Australia’s odd place in the world. We’re a remote, affluent country that has a hunger for everything our other western counterparts do. However that remoteness means that companies are, for one reason or another, not interested in bringing their business here or, if they do, it is done at an exorbitant premium. Once rights holders realise that we’ll switch to their services in a heartbeat if they’re reasonably priced and widely available you’ll see the piracy rates of Australia plummet. Until then though all this political posturing will do no one any good and Australia will remain the nation of pirates.