The Senate’s last night passed the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill without amendment, which means that piracy-related websites will soon be blocked. ABC Radio explains:
WILL OCKENDEN: It took several hours of debate, but in the end the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill passed the Senate, without any amendments, easily…
The bill passed the House of Representatives last week, which means the legislation will soon officially become law.
It will give the Federal Court powers to order internet service providers to block Australians’ access to piracy-related “online locations” hosted overseas.
The passage of the bill has raised controversy as it is unclear whether providers of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) would be blocked under the legislation.
Some VPN providers, however, are thrilled by the bill’s passage as they expect Australians to flock to VPNs en masse, leading to boom-time sales:
Shayne McCulloch is from a VPN privacy company called VPNSecure, which is currently based in Australia.
He says he doesn’t support the passing of the website blocking bill, but anytime a government passes anti-piracy legislation, business booms.
SHAYNE MCCULLOCH: Traffic-wise, it’s normally from any country that these discussions are going on and is nominally about 300 to 400 per cent in traffic, and then sign-ups will end up being around 20 to 35 per cent more from that specific country.
WILL OCKENDEN: He says he’s recently seen huge spikes in traffic and sign-ups coming from Australian users.
SHAYNE MCCULLOCH: The Dallas Buyers Club, the metadata retention, and I would expect to see over the next couple of weeks the same sort of statistics in regards to this new law.
WILL OCKENDEN: It’s a similar story for overseas based CyberGhost VPN, which says it has millions of VPN users.
Leaving aside the practicality of blocking VPNs, which are used legitimately by hundreds of Australian businesses to protect their data, it is patently clear that the Government’s Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015 is designed for one purpose only: to protect Foxtel’s antiquated business model and hand monopoly-style rents to the Coalition’s cheer-leader-in-chief, Rupert Murdoch. In turn, taxpayer dollars will be squandered in a bid to help someone who is already rich and powerful become even more rich and powerful.
Australian households currently employ VPNs to bypass geoblocks and access overseas content at globally competitive prices. In effect, they are using VPNs to overcome the ‘restraint of trade’ (tricked up as Copyright) that means Australians do not, legally, have access to a free market for digital content.
Bizarrely, the mob that keep crowing about “free trade” – the Coalition – are precisely the ones that are endeavouring to prevent free trade in digital content.
In doing so, they have completely disregarded the findings of the IT Pricing Inquiry, which among other things recommended an end to geo-blocking of content and amendments to the Copyright Act to allow parallel imports and circumvention of technological protection measures that control geographic market segmentation.
