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Australian ISPs Reject Calls To Police Their Users

Posted by Zonk on Fri Aug 31, 2007 09:15 AM
from the they-like-money-i-bet dept.
Privacy Government The Courts News Politics
jon_cooper writes "After recent setbacks in the RIAA's lawsuits, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has decided to try a different approach in Australia - they want ISPs to do their dirty work for them. Australian ISPs, though, have soundly rejected calls from AFACT to slow down or terminate user accounts that AFACT has determined are being used to distribute copyrighted works. Telstra (one of the larger ISPs in question) had this to say: 'We do not believe it is up to the ISPs to be judge, jury and executioner in relation to the issue when the content owners have any number of legal avenues to pursue infringements.'"
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Firehose:Australian ISPs Reject Calls To Police Their Users by jon_cooper (746199)
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  • Doing said dirty work could be risky. Termination based on loose accusations might end up in lawsuits. Somehow I got the feeling that they don't want any of those.

  • AFACT should pay the call center costs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by G4from128k (686170) on Friday August 31 2007, @09:44AM (#20423773)
    The issue here is the customer service costs (and loss of revenue). If an ISP cuts off a customer (rightfully or wrongfully), it's the ISP that pays for the irate calls from those customers and suffers from a loss of revenue. Even if the ISP uses an Indian call center, they still face several to tens of dollars in costs as the customer tries to determine why they were cut-off and how to regain service.

    Assuming that people have a right to confront the accuser (AFACT), then shouldn't AFACT bear the labor costs of that confrontation?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by conspirator57 (1123519)
      not to mention the upfront costs of adding systems and personnel to identify users who are distributing copyrighted works.

      This requires very intrusive and labor intensive monitoring of P2P streams. In most countries, the copyright holder is responsible for enforcing their own copyright. For good reason.

      Also, the people who would work for the ISP and end up with this job would likely have even less motivation than the ISP. It'd be a pretty demoralizing job.

      From the putative ISP copyright holders' protecti

  • Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mystery00 (1100379) on Friday August 31 2007, @09:50AM (#20423833)

    A report produced last year by web monitoring company Envisional found the per capita rate of television show piracy in Australia was the highest in the world. It said Australians accounted for 15.6 per cent of all online TV piracy.

    I find that part particularly interesting purely because of the idea of pirating TV shows, how, exactly, do you pirate TV shows? Watching them on TV is a free service, you have also been able to record from the TV for a very long time, what exactly is the difference between recording from the TV, and downloading the show from the net, and how does that effect the broadcasting industry?

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by FellowConspirator (882908) on Friday August 31 2007, @10:29AM (#20424357)
      They're worried about the advertisement being removed and being able to resell the content. Of course, the advertisement revenu is somewhat of a Red Herring, since the model already presumes all the revenue stems from the initial broadcast or rebroadcast (i.e., the cost is based on viewership for the time slot; so the advertiser's bought the attention of the estimated number of viewers).

      They're also worried that Internet availability undermines their availability to sell advertising for rebroadcasts and might impact packaged sale of shows on DVD. There's a better argument for that.

      I think that, increasingly, but removing their shows from Internet distribution they're undercutting exposue of their properties to a wide audience. There's plenty of opportunity to capitalize on content without adhereing to an onerous in-broadcast advertising model.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)

      by deniable (76198) on Friday August 31 2007, @10:44AM (#20424625)
      One of the major reasons cited for downloading TV here is the time delay from the US/UK. In the bad old days it took 3-4 years for ST:TNG to start here. Must have been the dubbing delay. We then got the shuffled season 1 and 2, the graveyard time-slot and irregular schedules. Back then people got around it by mailing VHS tapes.

      So when Australian networks treat a show like garbage, downloading gives you a better product with more reliable timing. The counter for this is that we are now getting some shows within weeks of the original airing. Californication is about two weeks delayed. This helps protect the ad revenue.

      • Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)

        by soulsteal (104635) <<gro.733l3> <ta> <laetsluos>> on Friday August 31 2007, @01:10PM (#20426559) Homepage
        The dubbing wasn't the delay. Rewriting the script so that all the guys are named Bruce? That takes FOREVER!
        • When they showed them in Australia somebody decided to sort them all by theme. Thus we ended up with all the "Wesley saves the day" episodes from season 1 and 2 in a block right after the first episode. Waiting up until midnight to watch effectively a rewrite of the previous weeks episode was a bit annoying - I couldn't just set the video as the show before it ran up to an hour over time or sometimes finished early. I still have no idea why I ended up seeing all of ST:NG after an intro like this.

  • First ever positive Telstra comment... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by splutty (43475) on Friday August 31 2007, @09:51AM (#20423841)
    Scary... This must be the first positive thing I've ever heard about Telstra. I'm wondering how long they're going to maintain that stand. Call me cynical, but I'm quite sure the next step is 'buy the government'..

  • Idiots (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SlashDark (1150245) on Friday August 31 2007, @09:56AM (#20423909)
    With all the zombie computers, trojaned by kids or simply hacked ones it would be easy to make victims download copyrighted stuff without them even knowing it. And so the ISPS would have to either shut down those people's accounts (even though they didn't do anything) or have loads of work to find the one who hacked the computer, and most of the time they probably can't.
  • ... and that's really the crux of the matter. Every picture you take, every letter you write, every story you tell, whatever you create is copyrighted -- by you. You have every right in the world to distribute your creations and you expect to. When you browse a company's web-site, you are receiving images and content that are, ostensibly, copyrighted by them which they also freely distribute so that you can view them on your own computer.

    The key is not that a work is copyrighted, but rather that the distribution occurs without the permission of the copyright holder. There's where it gets sticky. The ISP knows you are exchanging copyrighted works because everything is copyrighted. What the indutry is asking for is that the ISP identify specific chunks of data for which the distribution constitutes infringement. But how can the ISP know whether infringement is taking place?

    For something to be infringing, they will need to know whether or not the sender of the content is the copyright holder, a licensee for the content with permission to redistribute (like iTunes), the terms under which the content may be distributed (only if fee collected and DRM in place), whether those terms are met (valid credit card number used / the user hasn't implemented a hack to remove DRM), whether the copyright has expired (there are still some copyrights that expire), or whether the distribution constitutes an exception to copyright protection (such as a "fair use" under US law). How can the ISP possibly know these things?

    Well, they can't possibly distinguish (doubly so if the content is encrypted). Some of those things can only be answered by a court.

    Nevermind it being an unnecessary burden on ISPs or a violation of their customers, the ISP is simply unable to know the legal context in which data is distributed and whether it may constitute infringement. Any accusation of that sort would necessarily need to be vetted through the approriate legal authority, not the ISP.

  • Australian Copyrights Act (Score:3, Informative)

    by KuRa_Scvls (932317) on Friday August 31 2007, @06:31PM (#20429583)
    Australian Copyrights Act clearly protects ISPs from legal action through the copyright infringement of the users of ISPs.

    http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ ca1968133/s116aa.html [austlii.edu.au]

    [116AA to 116AG] [Press next if you want to read them all]

    Quite frankly, I think this is a great legislation, understanding that the ISPs do not, and should not have

    any liabilities thrown at them for something their customers have been doing behind their back.

    Is there a similar legislation in America?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Nazlfrag (1035012)
      Thanks for the link, it was an interesting read. However, there is this section:

      (3) For an infringement of copyright that occurs in the course of the carrying out of a Category A activity, the relief that a court may grant against a carriage service provider is limited to one or more of the following orders:

      (a) an order requiring the carriage service provider to take reasonable steps to disable access to an online location outside Australia;
      (b) an order requiring the carriage service provider to terminate a specified account.

      (4) For an infringement of copyright that occurs in the course of the carrying out of a Category B, C or D activity, the relief that a court may grant against a carriage service provider is limited to one or more of the following orders:

      (a) an order requiring the carriage service provider to remove or disable access to infringing copyright material, or to a reference to infringing copyright material;
      (b) an order requiring the carriage service provider to terminate a specified account;
      (c) some other less burdensome but comparably effective nonmonetary order if necessary.

      So while it protects them from monetary damages, it seems ARIA has a case under those laws. Not the reassurance I was hoping for.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by bonoboboy (1033874)
      Besides, at the moment it's in the ISPs' best interest NOT to help the recording agencies out. They are, after all, a business and policing everyone's internet usage would cost a great deal of money. Are the recording industry peeps going to help pay for those costs? I didn't think so ...

    • Re:Of course they won't (Score:5, Insightful)

      by deniable (76198) on Friday August 31 2007, @10:30AM (#20424377)
      Well as you're 'Speaker of the truth,' I guess nobody likes the always on connection, modem latency isn't a problem, and people don't need the phone line free to talk to people.

    • Re:Of course they won't (Score:5, Insightful)

      by robbiethefett (1047640) on Friday August 31 2007, @11:40AM (#20425445)

      Most of the biggest demands for broadband probably come from people who illegally download and/or upload copyrighted content. If those acitivities were forced to stop, those people would quite possibly be happy with dial-up.
      Who do you work for? MaBell? MS? **AA? I'm not sure what your angle is, but it would appear that you have no clue as to why the words you just typed are completely ignorant and devoid of the tiniest bit of truth. You want legitimate uses for bandwidth? How about Gaming; be it console or PC, they all share broadband online services. Or possibly streaming On Demand services from cable companies. What about the thousands of universities all over the place that send HUGE data files back and forth between researchers. But maybe you're right.. if those researchers want to cure cancer they can try doing it one packet at a time, huh? What about when Grandma Jones wants to see her newest grandson, but she's immobilized half a world away? I guess sending her video caps from the insanely expensive HD camera you bought just for that sort of thing is unnecessary. And I guess it's pretty stupid to think that people spend millions of dollars each year on fully-legit for-pay services like itunes, streaming netflix, and skype.
      I won't even get into the problems with the copper infrastructure vs. fiber. I'll even leave the cost analysis out of the equation.

    • Re:Same ISPs as in the U.S.? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2007, @09:54AM (#20423883)

      Of course, New Zealand is rightfully sovereign, but I'm not sure that calling an ISP that services both Australia and New Zealand a "multinational".

      Do you realise that this kind of attitude is why Americans are stereotyped as being totally ignorant and ego-centric? Just because a company doesn't cater to your precious US of A, it doesn't mean it isn't multinational. Multi. National. It means that it operates in multiple nations. Such as Australia and New Zealand.

    • Re:Same ISPs as in the U.S.? (Score:5, Informative)

      by microbrewer (774971) on Friday August 31 2007, @09:57AM (#20423939) Homepage
      Australia has Telstra the former national government owned incumbent telephone monopoly that still thinks its part of the government .

      Because it was the national incumbent Testra still own most of the infrastructure and has control over the Australian backbone that is leases to ISPs at exorbitant rates ,

      Most Australian broadband plans are either metered or capped .

      Mark Pesce an American that Lives in Australia (although we call him an Aussie now since hes applied for Citizenship ) who was also one of the creators of VRML did a great piece in the Meblorne Age why Aussies hate Telstra

      http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/why-we-all- hate-telstra/2007/05/19/1179497337693.html?page=fu llpage [theage.com.au]
      • It's like an entity that spent billions of dollars building infrastructure now feels like they have some right to charge money for people that want to use it.

        Yes, I know it was done with taxpayer money. But taxpayers decided to vote in a government that made it clear they were going to privatise it, and now it's a typical corporate entity - one that owns almost all the telecommunications infrastructure in the country - and now everyone has to cop it sweet.

        I find it hard to believe that this Mark Pesce bloke

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mcbridematt (544099)
      Basically not. The closest to multinational is #2 Telco Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, in turned owned by the Singapore government.

      AOHell gave up and sold their user base to Primus Telecommunications, who may be American owned, but not controlled as such.

      ISPs won't be bullied by ARIA (australian RIAA) etc. as Aussie's are top pirates (forcing local TV networks to not seasonally delay American imports), and pay a hell of a lot for unfiltered internets. Considering internet here is sold in band
    • Yes and we are all a bunch of dirty thieves!
      While your typed that I stole your wallet.
      Now watch as i escape on my kangaroo!

      </sarcasm>

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