A coalition of ISPs has proposed new rules for dealing with Australians thought to have downloaded copyrighted material. It has already generated a lot of controversy and discussion, but just how will the process work?
Five major Australian internet service providers (ISPs) — iiNet, Internode, Primus, Optus and Telstra — have released a proposal for dealing with online piracy. It’s an education-based scheme that doesn’t force ISPs to cut off customers accused of piracy by movie studios, but there’s a way to go before it becomes reality.
Chances are you’ve used Google’s automatic suggestions when you start typing a search term, but there’s a big area where those features don’t work: many terms relating to torrents and torrent-serving sites. TorrentFreak reports that if you type the names of well-known content-sharing sites, such as The Pirate Bay, you now won’t see any suggestions at all.
It’s still not clear if there’ll be a further appeal in the iiNet vs studios piracy case, but the ISP isn’t staying quiet on the issue while it waits to find out. In a new paper it argues that there should be an independent body which assesses and assigns penalties for copyright infringements, drawing on the points model we’re familiar with from driving licences.
It’s been more than a year since the original result of the trial bought against iiNet by various copyright bodies, which found that iiNet couldn’t be held responsible for the actions of its BitTorrent-loving users. That finding was appealed, but the appeal has failed, with the Federal Court today upholding the original decision.
Our post yesterday about when readers feel piracy is justified sparked a range of responses, but one of the most common reactions was “when I can’t use a product because of region coding”. Over on our sibling site Kotaku, editor Mark Serrels has an extensive exploration of the legal issues surrounding region coding in Australia which is well worth a read.
YouTube’s been dealing with “piracy” on the music and television front for since the service was first launched five years ago, but as tech blogger Amit Agarwal recently discovered while searching out software reviews on YouTube, it’s also become a hotspot for software piracy.
