Assistant commissioner to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), Tim Morris, has today confirmed that authorities are not interested in using the Coalition’s proposed data retention scheme to go after internet pirates and would be prevented from doing so by the commonwealth ombudsman. From The Guardian:
Phone numbers, the time and duration of calls, email addresses and, potentially, URLs would all be stored, but Morris reiterated that the AFP was “not interested in someone sitting down in their lounge room torrenting Game of Thrones”.
“We’re not going to have a taskforce come out to get [pirates] based on metadata collection. I need to make this clear. That’s a no”…
Any changes to the kind of metadata collected and the types of crimes it is used to investigate would require an ombudsman’s approval, Morris said…
Greens senator Scott Ludlam, who was also at the conference, said ombudsman’s oversight provided only “weak” protection and that the public could not take the AFP’s assurances the scope of the scheme would not expand in the future.
However, while the authorities might not be interested in unauthorised downloading, ISPs from 1 September will be required to hand over users’ details to copyright owners if they are caught downloading three times in a year. From The SMH:
Rights holders will identify infringers by their IP address, which ISPs allocate to each customer…
ISPs will be forced to keep track of customers’ IP addresses and be obligated to issue an escalating series of warnings to those accused of illicitly downloading movies and TV shows.
Account holders accused of infringing copyright will be issued an Education, Warning and Final notice, which do not need to relate to works owned by the same rights holder…
If an account holder is issued an Education, Warning and Final notice all within 12 months their ISP will, on the request of a rights holder, “facilitate an expedited preliminary discovery process”. In other words, after three strikes in a year your ISP will be expected to hand over your contact details via the courts without a fight.
Time to go long VPN providers, who will likely experience booming business once these new rules (and data retention) are introduced.
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