Yesterday news broke that Attorney General of killing your Monday night vibes George Brandis and the Abbott government are at current seeking to
pass draconian legislation designed to curb our historic rates of online content piracy.
The proposed two pronged attack includes mandating all Australian internet service providers (ISPs) to issue ominous infraction notices to people found to have repeatedly downloaded content (game.of.thrones.s04e01 – game.of.thrones.s04e10, say) and calls for those same ISPs to block access to notorious file-sharing websites such as The Pirate Bay. Or, as it is commonly known, censorship.
The Australian Pirate Party begs to differ in a newly launched change.org petition, arguing that the government should stop seeking to punish Australian media consumers presented with precious few options when it comes to legal means with which to access content and focus instead on the outdated nature of the Australian media industry whose continued inability to provide a reasonably-priced alternative is as complicit in piracy rates as the consumers they seek to demonise.
According to Torrent Freak: “Today the Australian Pirate Party says that it will do all it can to ensure that neither mechanism lands on Aussie soil. With the launch of a petition resting on the notion that neither technique has been shown to be effective against piracy, the Pirates hope to stop the juggernaut in its tracks.
“There has been no evidence advanced that graduated response regimes are effective. In fact, academic literature on the matter has been skeptical that they have any measurable impact on reducing file-sharing,” Brendan Molloy, Councillor of Pirate Party Australia, told TorrentFreak in a statement.
“Our petition is intended to remind the Senate of its obligations as the House of Review. It lays out detailed reasons for opposition to the proposals – including that neither will work – and calls on the Senate to reject any legislation instituting either a graduated response scheme or website blocking.”
The three main issues here are 1) content availability 2) timeliness of that availability and 3) the pricing of that content. As it currently stands no “legal” offering exists which satisfies all three conditions. But it’s not like we wouldn’t pay for it. What we can assume from the growing number of Australians paying to access American content providers such as Netflix through VPN and proxy services (itself a way to bypass the government’s proposed anti-piracy laws) is that we are willing/able to pay for content as long as the price is right. Is that so much to ask?
