Content distributors, creators and other associations have banded together to create The Digital Content Guide, a website that details all the legal avenues Australian can use to access digital content, in another bid to combat online piracy.
Foxtel, Music Rights Australia, Screen Australia and a number of other content groups have pooled all the available streaming and download services available in Australia onto The Digital Content Guide, linking to places where content can be viewed or played legally, either for free or with a fee.
ARIA chief executive Dan Rosen estimates the site launched with 80 content services. “Money will flow back to the creatives and the people who invest in our creatives,” he said. “This ensures there is ongoing support for the creative industries.”
Organised into subcategories, each icon listed points to a website for a legitimate media service. User’s can’t search individually for which subscription service contains which tv show, film, song, artist or game they are looking for. The launch of the guide is a bid to combat the argument often made my defenders of online piracy that digital content isn’t readily available to Australian consumers.
Just last week a federal government discussion paper revealed tough measures to combat online piracy. Such proposed changes included forcing internet service providers (ISP) to block overseas sites known to offer illegal access to content and to compel ISPs to stop users illegally downloading movies and music.
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull talked again about digital piracy in a post yesterday on his blog. “If you make it hard and expensive to acquire content legally and at the same time it is easy and free to acquire it illegally and if the owners of that content are reluctant to take legal action against those who do acquire it illegally, well it’s pretty obvious, in the absence of any other sanction, that is going to incentivise copyright infringement,” he wrote.
