Australia May Introduce Site Blocking To Prevent Copyright Infringement 85
Bismillah writes: The conservative Coalition government in Australia is on the verge of introducing legislation requiring ISPs to block sites alleged of copyright infringement. Details of the bill have not yet been published, but it is expected to be sent to Parliament this week.
BitTorrent Trackers don't infringe copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that the entire point? They just help people find other people who are infringing copyright.
The first lawyer with a pair of balls is going to have a field day with this.
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When you open the door for a robber, especially when they look like a robber, you're guilty too.
Re:BitTorrent Trackers don't infringe copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFS... The conservative Coalition government in Australia is on the verge of introducing legislation requiring ISPs to block sites alleged of copyright infringement.
A mere accusation appears to be enough to get a site blocked.
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Only complaints from big players will be heard, and only big players can afford to dispute each other's complaints. In its majestic equality, the law allows anyone with thousands of dollars to spend on lawyers to get stuff blocked and unblocked.
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Heck, lots of people post unauthorized images on Facebook. (Do people post videos on there? Haven't been on in years so I don't know.) Not exactly what they intended with the copyright infringement law but they should be careful what they wish for.
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In these situations, the law is not about reality or what works or not. What these cretins are trying to do is redefine reality. Of courser, reality could not care less.
Gubmint considers game of "Whack-A-Mole" (Score:2)
True story (Score:5, Insightful)
I was having breakfast at my local cafe w/ my partner last weekend, next to us a group of 4 normal aussies sit down at the table and after ordering start talking about this situation.
They clearly weren't in IT, not overly tech literate, and in fact like most typical aussies were pretty "anti-big-brother" by the sounds of it... However while discussing this topic of 3 strikes laws and nation-wide blocking of sites, etc - one of them brought up the concept of VPNs and how they could be used to work around all of this for $5-$10 a month, seemingly a tech literate friend must have told them about it - and now it's spreading to his friends via word of mouth.
A lot of people here are probably already using VPNs for work or to avoid surveillance, and some of you might think that this is the solution to the problem but "most people" won't know about VPNs or know how to set it up.
But the fact of the matter, where there's a will there's a way, and word of mouth is very effective at spreading information to all types of people from all walks of life - no matter how hard the government try, every day ordinary australians - be they house wives, kids, grandparents, or the tradie down the road - they're simply going to end up using a VPN to work around this.
Try as you might Abbott, you can't do shit. I suggest you put our money somewhere worth while, say, into science and education, this thing you don't believe in but manages to thwart everything you've been trying to shove down our throats all this time.
Re: True story (Score:1)
Except last time they tried to block anything, it was as simple as changing your dns.
They have nfi.
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The thing I find truly infuriating about all this is the moment this passes the senate and actually gets through (which it probably will because we're a bunch of ignorant fools) it will destroy what quality we had left for consume grade internet services. Most of already have to put up with poor quality services off low bandwidth RIM nodes and the lies.
I really wish we as a people had more say that just voting in the next bunch of dictrators and actually had a say in things that are important to us.
If copyr
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Just because there will likely be a way to get around it doesn't mean we should let them pass the law in the first place without a fight. Sure, you could use a VPN (for now, until they get around to blocking most of those too). But wouldn't it be a lot better to simply stop this law from passing in the first place?
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where there's a will there's a way, and word of mouth is very effective at spreading information
This right here. I have several friends and colleagues in China, all of them have Facebook accounts, many of them use Google a lot. When the government does something that the general populace disagrees with the populace will typically:
1. Sit back and take it because what can one man do vs the government right?
2. Talk, search, and find a way around the problem.
The terms Tor and VPN are becoming common household names.
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This.
It applies universally.
When we compare population sizes of interested parties, there are a hell of a lot more people who DON'T work for the authorities than do.
That means the odds are great that people on the dark side have members who are much more savvy than government/business/ISP gatekeepers.
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You do not need a .onion address to circumvent blocking on the client side, an exit-node somewhere else is quite enough. Besides offering anonymity, TOR can be thought as a VPN to whatever exit-node you chose.
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Or, as the pirate bay has, about a billion different mirror sites.
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Indeed.
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Yes, but that would be the DNS that the exit node uses, not your local one. It would be a poor anonymity solution that tunnels all traffic, except that it does local DNS queries and hence tells you ISP what sites you are visiting.
Good luck. (Score:5, Informative)
They've also tried this in Finland.
How effective is it? Two words: Mirror and Proxy. It literally has no effect on piracy. It's a waste of resources legislated in by people with no handle on the situation.
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It is not a waste of resources if it manages to censor a bunch of other stuff as well.
They have the Internet, Down Under? (Score:1)
How is that even possible? Don't the ones and zeros come out all sideways when the tubes flush the wrong way round?
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Even if the ones and zeros did come out sideways, plenty of modulation schemes are insensitive to phase inversion.
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Australian here (Score:5, Informative)
This is the kind of bollocks that the government has been talking about since day one. Mostly driven by the deplorable ACT Attourney General, George Brandis.
The first thing I should point out is that it's just talk. They're talking about introducing legislation to parliment. They haven't done anything but talk.
The second thing is, the Libs face a hostile senate. The Liberal party are our conservatives BTW. Whilst they can pass it in the lower house, it will fail in the upper house.
The third thing is, they will face a revolt from their back bench, many of whom are facing re-election in the next 18 months in an environment where the Liberal party is losing almost every election they're coming up against. So a lot of them are thinking of their own good over the parties.
Finally, ISP's are a powerful lobby over here and you can bet they dont want to turn customers to smaller ISP's who will skirt the laws.
So I'm not worried. the LNP (Liberal/National Party) haven't been able to do much of anything and what they have done has earned them a severe backlash.
Re:Australian here (Score:5, Informative)
To put this into some perspective for non-Aus people: the LNP government is still trying to get major items from last year's budget passed. And this year's budget is only about 8 weeks away...
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You have budgets? Obama's pet legislature has run without a budget for almost his entire term in office.
Re:Australian here (Score:5, Informative)
What I find most disappointing is that the previous Labor government was planning to push through mandatory internet filtering and the conservative LNP party was up in arms about how evil that was. Now they are pushing a similar thing as well as a potential 3 strikes law. Makes it hard to pick who to vote for.
That said I agree with mjwx, this legislation will be highly populous and fail in the senate.
Re:Australian here (Score:4, Interesting)
I made the same prediction about Conroy's filter and most of slashdot laughed - this proposal will go nowhere and be will forgotten before the next election, especially now that we have a communications minister with a functioning brain and his eye on the top job.
Makes it hard to pick who to vote for.
Yes, but now you know who to vote against in the senate. :)
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Its not just parties like Family First but also factions of their own parties.
What Americans might find difficult to understand is that our parties aren't divided on left and right lines (there are no left win parties left in Oz, even the Greens a
Re:Australian here (Score:5, Insightful)
The second thing is, the Libs face a hostile senate. The Liberal party are our conservatives BTW. Whilst they can pass it in the lower house, it will fail in the upper house.
Don't be so sure about that. The only reason Labor didn't introduce a very similar bill last time was they lacked the support of the greens. Fucking over Australia seems to be the only mission that has any kind of bipartisan support by the government.
The only reason this would get blocked is if Labor stick to their opposition tactic of "block everything to discredit the government". I must say though I do like the situation. I hope we forever stay in a world where the government of the day can't pass bullshit bills.
Re:Australian here (Score:5, Interesting)
They have moved a long way from where they started. Originally they were a liberal party. Really they shifted to being a truly conservative party under John Howard. I think the title of his auto-biography sums it up "Lazarus Rising"
From their own site.
In 1944, the Liberal Party of Australia was founded after a three-day meeting held in a small hall not far from Parliament House in Canberra. The meeting was called by the then Leader of the Opposition (United Australia Party) Robert Menzies. Robert Menzies had already served as Prime Minister of Australia (1939-41), but he believed that the non-Labor parties should unite to present a strong alternative government to the Australian people. Eighty men and women from 18 non-Labor political parties and organisations attended the first Canberra conference. They shared a common belief that Australians should have greater personal freedom and choice than that offered under Labor’s post-war socialist plans. Robert Menzies believed the time was right for a new political force in Australia - one which fought for the freedom of the individual and produced enlightened liberal policies.
In his opening address at that meeting, he said: ...what we must look for, and it is a matter of desperate importance to our society, is a true revival of liberal thought which will work for social justice and security, for national power and national progress, and for the full development of the individual citizen, though not through the dull and deadening process of socialism.
It is often said that Robert Menzies stood for the ‘forgotten people’ of Australia; those mainstream Australians whose goals, needs and aspirations had been ignored by Government.
On October 16, 1944, the name The Liberal Party of Australia was adopted, uniting the many different political organisations. Two months later, at the Albury Conference, the Party’s organisational and constitutional framework was drawn up.
The name Liberal was chosen deliberately for its associations with progressive nineteenth century free enterprise and social equality. By May 1945 membership of the Liberal Party had swelled to 40,000.
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The most amazing thing about the current Australian government is the Prime Minister, Toxic Tony and his pals, scammed their own party member representatives with a email bombing campaign to stay in power (the gist of the campaign being the people still wanted Toxic Tony in power). So they were setting up their own party to loose big time in the next election by actively ignoring their own electorate, so that Toxic Tony and Co could cash in on bigger government pensions as long as they hold those offices f
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Given how much money the big media companies spend on political donations to both sides of politics in this country I wouldn't be so sure that the Labor party are going to be voting no on this bill.
Not to mention that they are filming the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film right here in sunny Queensland and I can gaurantee that Hollywood is talking to both sides of politics and pointing out just how much money is being injected into the Australian economy by content production and that without strong anti
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It's not just talk; it's conditioning.
This opens the discussion for a plan to fight crime. This plan is in definite, actionable terms: block copyright-infringing sites. The more you hear things like that, the more normalized they sound.
Blocking Web sites alleged of a crime is about evading due process. Rather than convict someone of a crime, find them guilty in a court of law, and then take action, you just claim they have committed a crime and pass sentence. In this case, sentence is effectively re
Expect TOR traffic to increase... (Score:2)
Unless they are incompetent enough to use DNS-based "blocking". That is a complete non-starter.
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If they are halfway sensible, they'll not specify how to block - just specify what must be blocked, and leave the technological side to the ISPs.
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halfway sensible? not even close.
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Would surprise me too. After all, the idea itself is completely boneheaded and only serves to prop up a dead and decomposing business model.
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BTW the mining unions were the force behind the demise of Rudd in round one of the leadership brawl, they are just as anti-AGW as the mine owners themselves, and for the same reason. Gett
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Just goes to prove that the majority of voters in Australia are conservative. Do they complain as much as the Americans about their government?
Since this is Slashdot, you didn't read TFA. But if you had, it's clear that the US Government is the Australians' government.
Salami Slicing (Score:4, Informative)
Tell the people the laws are necessary to prevent The Children radicalizing. Then once you've created the regulating mechanism, increase it's scope outside Parliament. (preferably through carefully vague mandates). Salami slicing.
They've stuffed it in their collective haste to please Rupert Murdoch. It's a good thing our government is incompetent.
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Well subtle isn't one of the first words I think of when I think of Abbott.
g'day mate (Score:2)
firstly, we are finally getting Netflix etc in Oz, although it won't be the same as in the USA. As for blocking sites, I guess that no-one is going to give up their VPN anytime soon.
GPL violations as well ? (Score:3)
So if someone makes a complaint about corporate GPL violation - will the violating company's web site be blocked as well ? If so it could be useful. However I suspect that this law is aimed at protecting corporate profits and not controlling corporate robbers.
Not *alleged* (Score:1)
Subtle twisting of facts there, dear Submitter.
The Government at the same time said it would also amend the Copyright Act to enable rights holders to apply for a court order requiring ISPs to block access to non-Australian websites that had been PROVEN to provide access to infringing content.
I hope they have fun with that (Score:1)
The fact is, youtube is the biggest host for copyright infringed material and google search is the best way to find other sources for pirating. So unless they plan on blocking all Google services they can stick their legislation in their down under.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating piracy or anything. I just find it funny how people who seamingly know nothing about how the internet works can be tasked with writing legislation for how to police it. What we need to do is make a public collection, so we a
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What a novel strategy (Score:1)
Bont Skates (Score:1)