Two senior competition policy tsars – former ACCC head, Alan Fels, and former chair of the 1999 Australian Intellectual Property and Competition Review Committee, Henry Ergas, have lodged a joint submission to the Government warning that Australians would likely pay more to legally download music and movies, with the bulk of the revenue flowing offshore, if the Government’s proposed measures to prevent online piracy are implemented, while also warning that the costs of the measures “greatly exceed their benefits”:
The report finds that the implications of the Government’s proposals are not clear-cut, and they may in fact lead to greater legal uncertainty. And the economics of copyright are such that the proposals are not likely to reduce piracy, and instead may lead only to increased costs for Australians which significantly outweigh any theoretical benefits to copyright holders…
