iiNet chief regulatory officer Steve Dalby has called for Australians to hit back against government policy seeking to protect what he believes are the foreign interests of Hollywood Studios.
According to Attorney-General George Brandis, who once labelled Australians as the world’s worst culprits of online piracy, the Abbott government is considering new measures to tackle online piracy, including online copyright infringements notices directed at pirates and forcing ISPs to block websites involved in the downloading and sharing movies and music.
Dalby says the latest sound bites out of Canberra is the government going into bat for international rights holders.
“The Hollywood Studios have been relentlessly lobbying the Australian Government on a range of heavy-handed solutions, from a ‘three strikes’ proposal, through to website filtering – none of which take consumers’ interests into account,” Dalby wrote on iiNet’s official blog.
“This leaves us asking why Hollywood might think this approach would work in Australia when it doesn’t even work in their own patch.”
“Why would the Australian government let a foreign company dictate which websites our citizens can access? Are our legislators captured by foreign interests? Should we allow American commercial interest to dictate Australian national policy?”
iiNet made international headlines in 2011 when the ISP won a landmark case in the Federal Court against the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, representing affiliated companies Village Roadshows, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros, deeming the provider not responsible for copyright infringements by file-sharing customers.
The proposed system would likely thrust the onus and additional work of issuing infringement notices onto ISPs and subsequently result in greater costs for customers. But Dalby believes dissecting why piracy exists at such at rate is more important than jumping directly into a broken solution and claims illegal downloading in Australia is the result of ineffective services, such as Foxtel, which have failed to provide Australians with a viable option for popular content as opposed to the cheaper, more accessible US services Netflix and Hulu.
“That’s the fundamental difference between iiNet and the rights holders. They want to tackle how customers are pirating content. We want them to look at why, and then move forward, addressing the cause, not the symptom,” he says.
“Until that time, we’ll continue to push for a better future for Australian content users, one removed from the constraints being discussed in Canberra.”
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