For us Australians the reasons behind our high rates of piracy are clear: we want the same things that people are able to get access to overseas at the same prices that they receive them for yet we are unable to get them. Our situation has been steadily improving over the past couple years with many notable international services now being available on our shores however we’re still the last on the list for many things, fuelling further piracy. Of course this has prompted all sorts of reactions from rights holder groups hoping to stem the tide of piracy in the misguided hope that it will somehow translate into sales. The latest volley comes in the form of the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) 2015 which, yet again, attempts to address the issue in the dumbest way possible.
Essentially the amendment would empower rights holders to get an injunction against Carriage Service Providers (a broader term that encompasses all telecommunications providers) to block access to a site that either infringes on copyright or enables infringement. The amendment starts out by saying it’s prescriptive however the language used in it is anything but, often painting broad strokes which could conceivably be construed as being applicable to a wide range of sites and services, even VPNs in some cases. Whilst there are provisions in there that are supposed to prevent misuse and abuse much of it is left up to the discretion of the court with very little recourse for sites that find themselves blocked as part of it.
To be clear the legislation targets foreign sites only but makes no strict provisions for the site being targeted to be notified that they are facing an injunction. That’s left to the party seeking the injunction to do, something which I’m sure no rights holders will attempt to do. Whilst the law does say that this law isn’t meant to target sites that are mostly based on user generated content however it’s clear that the intention is to go after index sites, many of which are primarily based on user submissions. This puts the legislation at odds with the current safe harbor provisions which could see a site blocked due to a number of users submitting things which put it in the realms of “aiding infringement”.
Of course whatever blocking method is used will be readily circumvented, as it has always been in the past.
The rhetoric that’s surrounding this amendment is worse still, with the CEO of ARIA saying things like “We’ve made the content available at a reasonable price [but] piracy hasn’t diminished”. Funnily enough that’s a pretty easy thing to verify (or rebuke, as the case is) and last year Spotify did just that and found that music piracy, in Australia specifically, has been on the downward trend ever since the music streaming services came to our shores. Strangely enough Australians aren’t a bunch of nasty pirates who will repeatedly pillage the rights holder’s pockets, we’re just seeking a legitimate service that’s priced appropriately. If the rights holders spent as much money on deploying those services here in Australia as they did lobbying for copyright reform they might find their efforts better rewarded, both monetarily and in the form of good will.
Hopefully this amendment gets shot down before it becomes reality as it would do nothing to help the rights holder’s situation and would just be another burden on the Australian court system. It’s been shown time and time again that providing Australians with the same services that are available overseas will reduce piracy rates significantly and that draconian ideas like this do nothing to stem the tide of illegitimate content. The companies that are realising this are the ones that are killing the old media giants and things like this are just the last death throes of an outdated business model that is no longer relevant in today’s digital economy.
