Australian ISPs Will Be Forced To Block (Some) Pirate Websites 45
angry tapir writes: Senators representing Australia's two main political blocs have issued a report backing a bill that will allow copyright holders to apply for a court order forcing ISPs to block access to piracy-linked websites. The proposed law has met with a less-than-enthusiastic from anti-censorship activists and consumer advocates. Even the federal parliament's human rights committee has been concerned about whether the law is a proportionate response to piracy.
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Yahoo Serious is a bigger crime than any of those things.
So every search engine will soon be blocked (Score:2)
Anyone know why I can't get to any search engine now?
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Just google for an answer.
Crap.
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here is no such thing as a "pirate website"! Violations of copyright law are not "piracy"! Calling copyright violators "pirates" is just the copyright holders attempt to make the crime of copyright violation seem much worse than it is in reality.
Yes, copyright violation is a crime, however copyright has been extended extremely far beyond any reasonable time period. What is reasonable? 5 years is reasonable. Life+75 years is totally friggin stupid! Copyright has been extremely abused, and copyright hol
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It's the way of politics...
Tell me, how many members of congress know anything about health care insurance? Maybe one or two, but that doesn't stop them from passing comprehensive changes to the whole system and disrupting 14% of the economy...
So who's surprised that the people writing laws in Australia don't know what they are doing? Not me..
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Nice off-topic method of crow-barring in your opposition to the ACA, troll. No one cares.
I wouldn't say nobody cares... You apparently care enough to respond.... Badum tssssss
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What difference would it make if members of Congress knew a lot about health care insurance? They had to pass the law before seeing it.
Typo in headline? (Score:2)
The headline seems to have a typo, it shouldn't be Australian ISPs Will Be Forced To Block (Some) Pirate Websites, but rather Australian ISPs Will Be Unable To Block (Any) Pirate Websites
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Nothing Malcolm Turnbull says should be believed. There have been calls by this same government that using a VPN should be illegal, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they tried to get legislation to that effect passed.
Go read up on exactly what Turnbull (and the current government) promised about the NBN prior to the last election and everything that has gone on since.
Not only has he broken every promise or implied promise that he made before the election, but he's then gone on to make further
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Only getting fixed wireless to your house, huh?
I'm in the same boat, only I've too many trees in the way, and I'm not about to cut them down.
OTOH, I saw a fiber conduit being installed only a few streets away - for FTTN/VDSL. I'll still get high-speed internet, it just won't be FTTH, or fixed wireless.
BTW, Malcolm Turnbull is just about the only politician in the current lot with even an ounce of brains. Yes, he's toeing the party line, but he's the only one that understands even the basics of the technolog
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What I'm getting is actually irrelevant to how Turnbull has acted, but for full disclosure, I was due to have had FTTP build in progress by now. I'm currently slated to have FTTN build started sometime in the 12 months. And I will be paying the money to apply for FoD and we'll see just how eager they are to follow up with that ...
If I had been in a fixed wireless area I'd have been pretty happy - I probably would have had it by now, and could have been on the 50/20 trial (my ISP is part of the trial).
Re:VPN (Score:4, Insightful)
The man is a consumate politician...
You are describing Tony, Malcolm has two things the rest of the LNP ministers lack, a brain and a heart.
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"block" (Score:3)
Resolving the domain name to an internal warning page isn't "blocking".
That's just a minor inconvenience while people just use a different DNS.
Even if they decide to actively block the traffic originated to and from those IP addresses people will just use a tunnel.
So by all means, "block" it and say you did to get the government of your back.
In real life it has no meaning.
Like water (Score:2)
Then kids moved onto BBSs and in the very early 90s I could see kids stuffing those same floppies into machines connected to the internet. About the same time people would collect and share FTP sites
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This.
Governments and ISPs don't have anything that that users don't have. It's a level playing field except for one important set of parameters:
There are a shitload more people NOT associated with government or ISP, giving those people much higher odds of containing a subset of people MUCH more clever than governments and ISPs.
We all have the same computing hardware and software, and social media provides a push-down path for those of us who are not as gifted to benefit from those who are, even if it means
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Do they not realize that this stuff is both continuously evolving and is also like water.
Yes. Yes they do. Do you not realise how politics works? I'll give you an example:
Some industry in Australia wants to do business in the US that will result in more jobs, more taxes etc.
Aus govt asks US govt for trade deal to make this happen
Politicians don't give away things for free, so the US side ask for a bunch of stuff in return, one of which is stricter copyright control over US income producing products
Trade deal is agreed, Aussie politicians make some announcement to satisfy the contract, US p
I can still access the Bay with ease. (Score:2)
If the second-biggest ISP in the UK can't manage to block the biggest and most publicly-known pirate site in the world, what hope is there of this working?
Maybe they can torrent a copy of whatever China uses. It still won't work, but it's the best there is.
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There is one good aspect to this policy (Score:2)
If you accept that a policy like this was inevitable, which honestly it was, then the small line that says rights holders should be liable for the costs of the blocks is a massive win.
The various **AA groups won't pay for enforcement because they know there is no link to making more money. So when iiNet or Telstra say yes we will block your address and it requires x number of servers and $x for electricity it will die a quick death.
It would be better to see Differential pricing (Score:2)
Due to its relative isolation Australians pay significantly higher prices than their overseas brethren for a variety of goods and services. These prices have nothing to do with costs and everything to do with a market that has been geographically isolated from a historical perspective. What I find incongruous is that politicians do nothing to overcome these rigged markets. For example an xbox game is significantly cheaper in the US however it won't play on an Australian console, a home theatre amplifier cos
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+1. Turnbull once mentioned the issue so is aware of it. But men in corporate suites will always persuade the current government.
I rekon that if it is not available on fair and equitable terms then it does not deserve copyright protection.