Sorry folks, this doesn’t star Johnny Depp and a bottle of rum.
The Foxtel and Village roadshow filed a case at the federal court to have yet another website blocked by internet service providers (ISPs) to the Australian public.
The case was successful and now The Pirate Bay has been added to an ever-growing list of bit torrent sites that are no longer accessible through Australian internet.
This move is just the start of national censorship. It reminds me of my time in China when I was unable to access Facebook or many of my usual websites due to their internet restrictions. Welcome to the world of communism, I guess.
Now the issue with trying to police and censor the internet in this way shows how out of touch the court, and old-style business thinking, is: Australia is stuck in a mindset of “restrict everything so that the consumer can be charged a premium above the rest of the world,” and then add three taxes on it as well.
Because of this mindset, stone age companies like Foxtel are spending more time and money with knee-jerk reactions in our courts, trying to stop people accessing better content for a better price (or free). Clearly they have never heard of VPN, so none of these rulings matter anyway.
Not long ago the federal government was trying to fine ISPs for the piracy content downloaded by their customers. Having lost the case, they were then forced into being internet police and disconnecting people who were caught downloading pirated content.
Australia is known to be the world’s largest user for pirated content. This is not because we’re all cheap, but because there is no fairly priced competition for entertainment in this country; and thanks to the internet, we are well aware of how much Australians are paying.
With the introduction of Netflix, Stan, and other film streaming services, the need for piracy has gone down significantly. Same can be said with music streaming like Spotify. We are happy to pay when the price is fair and reasonable.
One idea that was provided was that ISPs charge a small sum on top of their monthly fees to cover all bit torrent downloading; this was quashed in quick order.
When it comes to technology, governments seem to be at least a decade behind the times. Just look at copyright law for music. Ten years after MP3 players was it actually legal to rip a CD to your computer! Before that you could have been sued for copyright infringement. Now we have streaming and there’s no legal mandate on how much the copyright holders are to be paid. This probably won’t be rectified for another eight years when it is long out of date and something new has come along.
More and more personal freedoms are being made illegal or driven out of price ranges with exorbitant taxation. The courts seem to encourage the old man business tactics than looking at how the situation can be made fair for all. Businesses should be constantly looking to change to improve their service to match the client needs – not the client to match the business plan.
In summary… stick it to them, get a VPN!
Photo by sandra.scherer 
