Obviously (because all of us are law-abiding citizens who would no sooner download a movie than shoot a cop) this isn’t a huge deal, but a bunch of the major record companies are making moves to get Kickass Torrents banned in Australia.
Universal, Warner and Sony are preparing to hurl some legal action at the popular torrent website, which they believe to be exploiting artists to make millions of dollars – laughably ironic coming from huge music labels who have a tendency to give only the tiniest fraction of cash back to artists on their roster, but sure.
Some changes made last year to the Copyright Act mean that companies can try have overseas websites blocked if they reckon the site exists mostly for stealing people’s shit. Considering that only extreme nerds ever use torrents for legal stuff, this applies to pretty much every torrent site ever.
Roadshow Films and Foxtel tried this last year, taking a swing at getting The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound and IsoHunt all blocked in a court case that’s still going.
Australia goes absolutely wild for piracy, thanks to a combination of how limited and expensive our access to the hot content all the bigger countries get is and because paying for stuff is actually much, much more lame than getting it for free.
History has shown (the last 10 years of history, not like, medieval history) that getting torrent sites shut down is pretty hard: torrent websites only store data about the pirated goods, not the goods themselves, so it’s difficult to prosecute for copyright infringement, and also they tend to just crop back up but hosted in a different country if they’re shut down.
Whether the lawsuit sticks and the blocking actually keeps them down is yet to be determined, but at least if you lose your torrents you can always pay $10 a month to watch the 5 or 6 movies that are on Australian Netflix.
Ironically, if you didn’t previously do internet piracy, you now have a list of places you could theoretically get free stuff illegally, enjoy!
Source: Mashable.
