Village Roadshow using courts to block pirate sites will achieve little
Yesterday, Village Roadshow and Foxtel confirmed they were leading separate actions in the Australian Federal Court to block piracy websites in Australia. In this cross posting from The Conversation, David Glance questions what court actions will achieve.
Unbowed by the defeat of Voltage Pictures to prosecute illegal movie downloaders, Graham Burke, co-CEO of Village Roadshow Limited, is spearheading a Federal Court action to block Solarmovie.ph, a pirate TV and movie streaming site. They will be the first to take advantage to changes brought in by the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015 which allows for courts to order ISPs to block access to sites that are infringing copyright.
How this will be achieved is yet to be decided, but the most likely way is for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block DNS access to the specific IP address or to use a technique called DNS cache poisoning which gives back an incorrect Internet address for an internet site name.
The action being taken by the Village Roadshow is being supported by Warner Bros, Universal, Paramount, Sony, Disney and 21st Century Fox. A further action by Foxtel is aimed at sites that include The Pirate Bay.
They may close the sight down, and of course it will just re-open and/or run on a mirror site with impunity. Then taxpayer can waste money paying for another court case.
I don’t pirate myself, but trying to use the courts as a solution is futile.
Hey David – besides giving people an excuse to steal other peoples work, your personalizing of this issue is an atrocious practice. The suggest that because Graham Burke sold his house for $7 million dollars as a reason to steal from his business is very poor argument and quite besides the point. Play the man and not the issue I gues. I assume you are aware that things (like movies and music) cost money to be made, ppl who work need to be paid? Actors, lighting people, grips, greens, costumes? Streaming content works as one way and so should content that gets shown in cinema’s. Encouraging stealing of work is an awful way forward. And everything it’s not all the fault of the distributors. The new way forward seems that the only ppl to make money are the online companies.