Piracy: Call for reform to help Aussie rights holders protect their product
Vanessa Hutley
Key bodies in the television and music industries have urged Attorney General George Brandis to make legislative reforms that would give Australian rights holders the ability to combat piracy and force internet service providers (ISPs) to take action.
The call from groups including the Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association (ASTRA) and Music Rights Australia (MRA) are for reforms that would require Australian ISPs to block or take down websites that host illegitimate material. They follow the release of statistics today showing Australians again led the way with illegally sharing versions of Game of Thrones.
Vanessa Hutley, general manager of Music Rights Australia told Mumbrella: “We hope the Attorney General will do as he said and allow rights holders to go to court and get a court order that would have ISPs block these sites.
“This isn’t about stopping people being on the internet, but nothing on these websites is about legitimate content.”
Andrew Maiden
However, ASTRA’s CEO Andrew Maiden said blocking websites would not solve the problem, but could help counter the growth of piracy.
“We recognise that’s not a perfect solution because pirates can change IP address and avoid the blocks, but by blocking the worst of the worst (the most popular) sites, you alleviate some of the damage that is done,” he said.
The call comes amid ongoing concern about the growth of piracy, with sites like Pirate Bay thought to now have as many as 1.4m Australia users, according to Nielsen.
Other popular pirate sites such as Kickass Torrents 1.3m Australian users, while Torrentz.eu has almost 500,000 users and Isohunt andTorcache.com have an estimated 245,000 users.
A report earlier this year from the Digital Citizens Alliance, a nonprofit focused on Internet safety issues, estimated the global ad revenue from a site like Pirate Bay was US$227 million in 2013.
“Music Rights Australia supports the recent announcement by the Attorney General he is reviewing the processes that would allow a rights holder to protect their work online,” said Hutley.
“These include getting third party injunctions, which is about disrupting the access of sites like Pirate Bay so that the legitimate services are allowed to compete on an equal playing field.
“Pirate Bay is still the number one infringing site in Australia and it grew last year 6 per cent year on year and that’s not just for music. We know it is illegal content because Pirate Bay does not licence the material it makes available. What it does do is make an awful lot of money from the ads which appear on it.”
Earlier this year Brandis signalled he was open to reforming key legislation in the area, suggesting there might be grounds to go further and introduce a “three strikes” rule to threaten the access of consumers downloading illegal content.
ASTRA’s Andrew Maiden said three strikes might be a way of changing consumer behaviour and shifting it to legal services such as Foxtel’s Play and Presto services, and Quikflix.
“(We could) send out a notice to someone who downloads content illegally, pointing out they downloaded content illegally, and when they do it a second time send a second, more strongly worded notice. And send another more more strongly worded notice when they do it a third time,” said Maiden.
“A lot of the piracy evaporates when people discover they are being watched and are reminded that they are doing the wrong thing. We’re not looking to slow down broadband, but the simple act of sending a message to the user by itself is enough to deter them.”
MRA’s Hutley said one of her biggest concerns “safe harbour” and secondary liability provisions in the copyright act, limiting their liability for damages in cases where the ISP has a policy for dealing with customers who repeatedly infringe copyright.
“The safe harbour sections and secondary liability provisions are not functioning as they were intended. We would like amendments so that if they want to have the benefit of being immune from liability and from being sued they need to take steps to ensure their networks aren’t being used for infringing purposes,” said Hutley.
Attorney-General Brandis was unavailable for comment but his office directed Mumbrella to a radio interview given by him a month ago in which he said: “I haven’t given up on the possibility of developing a voluntary industry-based code of practice.
“That will require the cooperation of the ISPs. But there is always the capacity, if that fails, for government to legislate.”
Nic Christensen and Megan Reynolds
*A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the 2012 iinet case was lost on “safe harbour” provisions of the copyright act.
Oh hai question-begging logical fallacy.
“DOWNLOADS CONTENT ILLEGALLY”, wow that sounds scary. You notice however that the people who make these claims and use these words never actually name a piece of law that has been broken or describe the way in which the person doing the downloading has broken it.
Note: in Australia there is no such thing as downloading illegally.
User ID not verified.
These people don’t get it nor do they understand the many other loopholes that exist and can be exploited over the net. They would be better off looking at their current business models and coming up with an innovative solution to the problem instead of trying to maintain the status quo.
User ID not verified.
I’m not sure that “Kissass Torrents” is a thing.
And if it is, I don’t want to know.
User ID not verified.
One of the principles of Australian law is that the courts decide who is innocent or guilty — and beyond reasonable doubt — not corporates and certainly not industry associations.
That’s the big problem with these endless proposals for three strikes schemes (which are stupid on the face of it. Why three? What possible relevance does baseball have to law enforcement in a country that plays cricket?). They allow corporates to determine whether people are guilty or innocent of copyright infringement, and completely ignore the burden of proof.
User ID not verified.
The model exists. Set up legitimate sites that can access by the average user. Include advertising to keep it running …and there you have it.
Keep double or triple dipping on the same product i.e. trying to sell the same product to broadcast, dvd and digital and people will see it as greedy (be it the case or not).
Finally, Australian middle men selling and reselling content from Europe or America are not trying to protect the industry, they are trying to protect their income. It’s survival, but it’s not noble.
User ID not verified.
Muppets.
User ID not verified.
Cut out the Australian distributor who does nothing except put their hand out for a subscription then shove ads down your throat (Murdoch-tel). Geo block and download direct from the US.
Remember in the old days CD’s were $30+ a pop, then parallel importing started, now $16 from overseas.
The artist still gets paid, that’s all I care about.
User ID not verified.
Block URLs and IP addresses. Yeah, that’ll work a treat. No-one will ever work out how to circumvent that…
“Safe Harbour not working as intended” – are you sure? It seems to be working exactly as planned.
Now when are Netflix or Hulu going to come here?
User ID not verified.
To echo Alex, nothing like calling for bureaucratic intervention rather than revolutionising your archaic business models.
User ID not verified.
“A lot of the piracy evaporates when people discover they are being watched and are reminded that they are doing the wrong thing. We’re not looking to slow down broadband, but the simple act of sending a message to the user by itself is enough to deter them.”
You know what also deters them, and what also makes piracy evaporate? High-quality, reasonably priced services, not the services you tell us are high-quality and reasonably priced when they’re really just the extent of what you’re willing to allow.
Movie and TV piracy has plummeted wherever Netflix has launched. iTunes, Spotify, and Steam have substantially reduced music and game piracy. More and more Australians are willing to *pay* for Netflix and Hulu Plus or endure ads in free Hulu streams to see new episodes as they’re released in the US, even though they could easily torrent them.
The reasons for all this are stunningly obvious, which is what makes the attitudes this article reports so aggravating. Principally, these services make piracy irrelevant for those who download due to poor availability rather than an ideological refusal to pay. I’d wager those people constitute a huge chunk or perhaps the majority of piracy, particularly TV piracy.
Honestly, fighting to set up three-strike rules when there’s no proof they work is simply pushing against the tide with effort and money that could instead be used to build something new and durable for the future. It’s sad to witness.
User ID not verified.
Make content available liker SEVEN and TEN and NINE do on their locally produced programmes about a week after they finish on TV.
Distributors are to blame for a lot of their own woes. Take a show like “White Collar” series 3 DVD set has only just been released in Australia when the USA are seeing the end of season five.
If you want it and have not seen it on TV, are people going to wait for 18 months, I think not.
CD’s I want the original CD with all the artwork and info. I purchased a download once and was dissappointed with no info.
Question: When the person who originally purchased the download passes away, is the download still available?
With records and CD’s they are still part of their estate,
User ID not verified.
And I totally object to Vanessa Hutley saying “nothing on these websites is about legitimate content”, which is pure BS. I download Open Source and Creative Commons content all the time from those websites.
And, if the industry provided value for money services, I would pay for the content.
Trying to block sites is a totally arse about way of attacking the problem.
User ID not verified.
“The safe harbour sections and secondary liability provisions are not functioning as they were intended.”
Ummmm, they’re functioning as intended – possibly not as you would like, but as intended.
“We would like amendments so that if they want to have the benefit of being immune from liability and from being sued they need to take steps to ensure their networks aren’t being used for infringing purposes,”
How, may I ask, is an ISP or service provider reasonably going to know or determine someone’s copyright is being infringed? The answer is that it simply is not possible.
User ID not verified.