On March 15, Village Roadshow's CEO, Graham Burke, penned a letter to the Department of Communications and the Arts, appealing for a review of the Copyright Online Infringement Amendment.

What that letter contains is an eye-opening range of claims - of Australia ending up "as bleak as a remote Bejing suburb", linking piracy with "drug selling" and "luring kids" into "criminal neighbourhoods that proliferate with prostitution" and insisting "wondrous Australian films are often more important than people we meet in shaping our world".

I couldn't make this up if I tried.

Read it in its glorious entirety here.

Court-enforced online roadblocks, demanded by movie studios, appear to be stopping only half of Australia's would-be pirates from reaching The Pirate Bay; even fewer once you allow for Aussies hiding behind a virtual private network, or VPN.

Australian internet service providers have blocked a range of piracy websites since December 2016, including The Pirate Bay and SolarMovie, after the Federal Court enforced site-blocking laws at the behest of a consortium of copyright holders headed by Village Roadshow.

Back in August, Creative Content Australia (CCA) launched their ‘Price of Piracy’ campaign, which aims to shed light on the issue of using torrent and streaming websites to illegally access content. Specifically, it wants to highlight the inherent risk users put themselves in when accessing these sites.

This campaign is the biggest anti-piracy push in Australia's history - but are scare campaigns really the right way to prevent people from downloading? And how do the facts and figures actually stack up?

The digital seas are becoming a perilous place for pirates. Today, the Australian IPTV provider Fetch TV announced it is joining forces with the Australian Screen Association (ASA) to combat online piracy. If you're partial to a bit of GoT plunder via illegal streaming and the like, here's what you need to know.

Dear Lifehacker, Is it possible to get around the government's blocking of illegal torrenting and streaming sites? Also, what about US Netflix? As far as I can tell, it should be legal to access this content if you pay for it.

The European Commission paid €360,000 ($541,980) for a study on how piracy impacts the sales of copyrighted music, books, video games and movies. But the EU never shared the report -- possibly because it determined that there is no evidence that piracy is a major problem.

File-sharing websites are not exactly known for their sterling reputation, though a few such as famed torrent site the Pirate Bay have been around for long enough while generally avoiding shady behaviour they have acquired a certain cachet with the internet community.

A billion times. That's how massive the flood of pirated Game of Thrones video was for the show's most recent season. The recently released data presents some interesting insights, too -- namely that torrents aren't nearly as popular as illegitimate streaming sites.

This week, Village Roadshow co-CEO Graham Burke announced the company will start suing Australians who infringe on its copyright. This means anyone who has streamed or downloaded a movie via an illegal pirate site is potentially in its cross hairs.

But when will litigation begin? Who will be targeted? And how much money will you need to pay? We spoke directly to Burke to get some answers.

Australian pirates have just been put on notice. The chairman for Creative Content Australia - a consortium of rights holders that counts Foxtel, Village Roadshow and the Australian Screen Association (ASA) among its members - has issued a stern warning to anyone who continues to access pirated content. In short, you can expect to be sued this year.

Foxtel's law-talking guys have struck again, with 127 domain names added to the ISP blacklist under site blocking legislation. Sites on the chopping block this time include Yes Movies, Vumoo, Los Movies, Cartoon HD, Putlocker, ProjectFreeTV and Torlock. Here are the details.

The recent online piracy debate in Australian courtrooms has raised many questions about how consumers are being monitored. Just what sort of trail do you leave behind when you use technology to access illegal copies of movies and other copyrighted material?

Dear Lifehacker, Like thousands of my fellow countrymen, I will be watching Game Of Thrones via illegal means this year. I refuse to be locked into a costly Foxtel contract for one show and the Blu-rays don't come out for ages. I feel it's a justifiable crime.

With that said, I'm sure the law probably doesn't agree, which brings me to my question. In respect to Australia's new anti-piracy laws, will anything bad happen to me if I dodge Foxtel this year? Or do the powers-that-be remain as toothless as before? Should I be worried?

The Federal Court has ordered Australian internet service providers to block access to Kickass Torrents websites. The order comes at the behest of several major music labels who have been pushing for the blocks in court since April last year.

ISPs now have 15 days to comply with the order. Of course, none of this really matters if you know how to get around a DNS block.

Dear Lifehacker, I teach a computer class and last week I had a client with a copy of Win 10 which was installed by a friend and it is weird. For example, it doesn't have MS Office so I used Wordpad to show him creating and saving text files but when he saved as an RTF the file morphed into a spreadsheet. His pictures folder is full of pictures of a red truck. I suspect that he does not have a legal copy although his computer seemed eager to install updates (I only had an hour for the lesson so didn't follow up on that). Is there a quick way of finding out if his copy is legal?

Dear Lifehacker, I work for myself but the landlord of my building provides my internet. Previously I have been able to download using torrents, but they have recently started blocking me. Is there a work around?

Not all virtual private networks (VPNs) are created equal. Some keep logs, some cap your traffic, some don't work on mobile, some don't work at all. This is what you need to know about choosing a VPN provider, as well as a few recommendations to get you started.

Village Roadshow and Foxtel have already managed to get a total of 61 domains across five torrent websites blocked in Australia. Now Village Roadshow wants to add a further 74 domains on the list and has applied to do so in the Federal Court.

We have consolidated the full list of ISP-blocked torrent sites along with the domains that Village Roadshow is seeking to block right here.

Last month, it was reported that Village Roadshow, the company that spearheaded the court case that forced Australian ISPs to block a handful of torrent websites, was on the warpath again. It wanted to block an additional 40 sites. That number has since swelled to 74. Here's what you need to know.