Australia’s largest internet service providers are battling to force film and television companies to pay for them to block websites hosting their pirated content.
Village Roadshow and Foxtel have taken Australia’s largest ISPs, including Telstra, TPG and M2, to court to try to force them to block their customers from websites such as The Pirate Bay. It is the first case of its kind since the government passed site-blocking legislation with Labor support late last year.
All parties are concerned that it will set the precedent for how all piracy websites are blocked in the future, and although the ISPs aren’t challenging that the sites in question infringe on copyright, they are concerned about how the sites will be blocked, and who should bear the cost.
In the Federal Court in Sydney this morning, counsel acting for Telstra revealed that there are nine points of disagreement between ISPs and rights holders, mainly to do with how ISPs would comply with orders to block websites, and the costs involved.
Piracy websites are like a hydra — when you cut off access to one site, another one pops up in its place. So in order to prevent people from finding a mirror to The Pirate Bay, for example, the court is considering ordering a “rolling injunction” that would allow mirror domains to be added to the list of blocked websites after an order has been made.
Of course, Australians with VPNs will still be able to access blocked websites.
But that rolling injunction means the costs will add up for ISPs if they have to keep blocking more and more websites, so there is a disagreement between the Foxtel, Village Roadshow and the internet providers on what the costs should actually be.
The government estimated the cost to be $263 to $350 per injunction (which could mean more than one website), and an annual cost to the entire industry of around $130,000.
But counsel acting for Foxtel Richard Lancaster argued that, based on international comparisons, “there is really nothing to it” in terms of ISPs complying with costs.
TPG said it would use DNS blocking to block piracy domains, and it estimated the cost would be $50 per domain. M2 said that it estimates costs at being between $400 and $800 plus additional overhead costs. Telstra has argued that, as an “innocent party”, it should not have to pay any costs associated with blocking websites.
A full hearing of the case has been set down for June 23 and 24, with the option of extending the hearing to June 27 if needed.
This case covers the first two of three cases filed since the passage of the legislation. The third case brought by the music industry will seek to block the piracy website KickAss Torrents.
What a mess. If you were a true conspiracy theorist, you’d swear that
Village Roadshow & Foxtel had just made large investments in the
VPN business. Win win?
UK blocks pirate bay, a mate of mine from there is forever asking me to get him magnet links to torrents. I paste the magnet link into an IM to him and ta-da, he’s pirating off a pirate bay torrent like the filter ain’t even there! Some pretty 1337 hax0rs right there.
I’m hoping the Australian clean feed is as easy to defeat.
400 years after Shakespear’s death Much Ado About Nothing. Site-blocking won’t stop determined ‘Pirates’. As the Productivity Commission noted, in recommending against geoblocking, the evidence is that most unlawful content downloading is prompted by a lack of availability at reasonable pricing.
“n order to prevent people from finding a mirror to The Pirate Bay, for example, the court is considering ordering a “rolling injunction””
I once asked a shire engineer how he set speed limits on country roads. He said that he measured the speeds on the road and set the legal limit so that 80% of current drivers were within the limit.
I wonder if the same principle could apply to file sharing.
Website blocking will always fail.
There are two main technical problems with website blocking . Basically, you can block at the domain name level, or at the level of the internet address.
Blocking domain names means that the content owner convinces a court to tell ISPs to drop problematic domain names from their name servers. This means that when someone tries to get access to Torrent sites nothing happens. The domain name doesn’t resolve correctly, and so it’s like the site doesn’t exist. Pirate Bay for instance, will just change its domain name, forcing a constant game of “here we go round the internet” for the content companies and the courts. In any event, you could still get access to torrent sites by getting a VPN or change your DNS lookup server. Blocking websites at the internet address level is a bit tricky. This involves stopping all traffic from a given IP number or a given block. The problem with this type of action is that it catches and stops innocent content. For networking reasons numerous websites can share the same IP number or address block, and so shutting down one IP address can wipe out other sites that are completely fine. Back in 2013, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission applied a little-used section of the Telecommunications Act to block three websites that were hosting investment scams. ASIC ended up looking stupid when the block also wiped out Australian access to around 250,000 innocent websites that happened to be hosted on the same address. The other technical problem is that you can’t block many of the places where infringing content is hosted. There are just waaaaaayyyyyy too many which makes blocking a technical nightmare. The law can’t just block sites that host infringing content, because sites such as The Pirate Bay actually don’t host infringing content. But if you draft the law to catch sites like this which help me find movie torrents, then you run the risk of shutting down Google. And they probably won’t be happy.
It could also threaten Australia’s cloud computing industry, because cloud storage is where a large number of infringing files are stored. So now we’ll have laws that favor US content industries at the expense of Australia’s digital future. At best, blocking laws might be slightly effective to reduce the access to overseas movie streaming sites. Maybe. This should make Foxtel and Netflix happy because a small number of people will buy a subscription as they can no longer get programs free on the internet.The question is, is it worth spending the amount of time, money, and effort that the government keeps expending to keep the copyright lobby happy? Probably not.