There is, however, an even ongoing bigger case in which the New South Wales police are accused of massive software piracy involving its criminal intelligence database.

The software in question, ViewNow, is developed by the UK company Micro Focus. While the company licensed its software to the police in the past, it discovered nearly two years ago the police were using thousands of unauthorized copies.

Even worse, the police also shared the software with third parties such as the Ombudsman’s Office, the Department of Correctives Services and the Police Integrity Commission. All without permission from the software company.

In an attempt to get compensated for several years worth of mass piracy, Micro Focus has filed a lawsuit in which it’s demanding more than $10 million in damages. Micro Focus’ managing director Bruce Craig says they saw no other option than to sue, as they can’t go to the police.

“When someone pirates your software you think who am I gonna call, the police? In this case, they’re the pirates,” Craig comments on 7.30.

“This is potentially a crime that has to be handled as a civil matter because everybody’s got their hands dirty,” he added. “The victims can’t go to police – it’s the police who are doing the stealing.”

At the center of the legal battle is a dispute over the licenses for the ViewNow software. Micro Focus says the police had licenses to install ViewNow on up to 6,500 computers, but in fact more than 16,000 copies were installed. In addition, the police shared copies with other organizations without permission.

“The licenses were for police only. Yet police were out there handing out our software like confetti,” Craig says. “They did not pay for those extra licenses. It’s incredible. It shows an organization that’s completely out of control.”

The police on the other hand claim that they are not aware of any restrictions. Instead, they claim that they could use as many copies as they want according to their interpretation of the contract.

To make matters even worse, Micro Focus is now threatening a new lawsuit as they suspect that the police have replaced the ViewNow software with an alternative called NetManage Applet. This application also belongs to Micro Focus, and they have not licensed the police to use that without restrictions either.

Who’s right and who’s wrong will eventually be decided by the court, but there is already one losing party – the taxpayer. The police have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and the case has barely begun.

Source: Australian Police Accused of Mass Software Piracy

ACTA imposes significant requirements on the 30 or so signatories should they ratify it, none are yet to do so, impacting far wider than the commonly discussed aspects of file-sharing and media piracy. ACTA brings generic medicines into play. To some extent it dictates how nations should deal with trade-marks and patents. In the words of Australian Law Professor Dr Matthew Rimmer, ACTA “seeks to define and channel how nation-states enforce concepts of intellectual property.”

Australia’s lack of public and political opposition to ACTA stands somewhat alone in the international community, accentuated by limited local media coverage. The rare light shone on Australia’s role in negotiations during last week’s “Justice Standing Committee” hearing only came after the treaty had already been signed in October, 2011 – as was noted more than once by the handful of politicians present.

Senator Scott Ludlam, an outspoken supporter of Julian Assange and his Wikileaks organisation, seized the opportunity to grill the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade and other supporters of ACTA who presented themselves. If body language is anything to go by, the good senator was less than enthusiastic about the answers he received.

Later in the week, a very different group of people gave evidence, drawn from the ranks of concerned members of Australia’s academic community. Their testimony was largely negative, attacking ACTA on multiple levels.

Human rights expert Dr Hazel Moir, of the Australian National University, pointed to the role copyright monopolies played in drafting the secretive treaty and questioned their motives. “The music industry has a very rigid business model. They’re only prepared to sell certain things at certain times,” Dr Moir testified.

Some of the harshest language came from Dr Matthew Rimmer, an intellectual property law expert, also from the ANU. Dr Rimmer took aim at the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade’s role in negotiating the treaty.

“The Department [of Foreign Affairs & Trade] have been one of the chief advocates,” Dr Rimmer told TorrentFreak after giving evidence. “They’re conducting and running their own line on what should happen. I’m not sure that represents a wider government approach.”

Dr Rimmer questioned why other government departments had not been included in the treaty negotiations.

“There was a need for Treasury, Finance and the Productivity Commission to be involved. I also think the Department of Health [& Ageing] have been ignored … their concerns have not been raised.”

Those concerns include the impact ACTA may have on Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme – a government program that provides subsidised drugs and medicines to the entire population. Bans on the use of generic medicines could see massive blow-outs in the cost of the scheme according to Dr Rimmer. “There’s many real problems with the one department having soul carriage [of ACTA] that have simply been ignored,” he said.

The Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade has been lead by no less than three ministers since ACTA negotiations began in 2008. None have shown a particular public interest in the treaty, preferring the rough and tumble of internal party politics and visits to Afghanistan and Washington.

Australia’s ruling Labor Party and conservative opposition have a long standing history of combining their numbers to pass treaties and agreements driven by the US State Department – as ACTA is.

Australia’s role in negotiating ACTA has been near invisible, both locally and internationally. Transparency in the process has been non-existent. Mainstream media coverage has been negligible. Expert local voices have been ignored.

Should Australia ratify ACTA, it will sign up to a treaty negotiated in secret by a single, questionably-lead government department with parliamentary hearings held after the fact and outcomes that could be felt across the legal and policy landscape of the nation. Such a process runs counter-intuitive to how a modern liberal democracy operates.

About The Author

Myles Peterson is an Australian Journalist & Writer.

Source: The Department For ACTA

“ISPs hold the key to reducing online movie and TV theft by 72%,” the headline of a now-debunked anti-piracy lobby group report shouted in September 2011.

But the pressure on ISPs had only just begun. Since September a series of meetings have been held between the entertainment companies and Aussie ISPs, all under the watchful eye of the Federal Attorney-General’s Department. The aim: to come to an agreement on what to do about illicit file-sharing.

It won’t come as a surprise to those familiar with the way ACTA was ‘negotiated’ that these meetings have all been held behind closed doors. Incensed by this and the fact that both content creators and Internet users have been locked out, journalist Renay LeMay at tech news site Delimiter has been making Freedom of Information requests to find out what has been going on. He has been stonewalled every step of the way.

Finally last week the Attorney-General’s Department sent LeMay five documents, but disappointingly nearly of the information contained within had been redacted.

While the documents did reveal the groups and companies in attendance – AFACT, Music Industry Piracy Investigations, the Communications Alliance, Telstra, iiNet and the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy – the names of individuals were redacted along with the meetings’ agendas.

The Attorney General’s senior legal officer Jane Purcell told LeMay that “..disclosure of the documents while the negotiations are still in process, would, in my view, prejudice, hamper and impede those negotiations to an unacceptable degree. That would, in my view, be contrary to the interests of good government — which would, in turn, be contrary to the public interest.”

But after LeMay accused ISP iiNet of compromising its integrity by participating in the closed-door meetings, iiNet chief regulatory officer Steve Dalby gave a general insight into the current state of play.

“The gap between rightsholders and ISPs is massive,” said Dalby. “Just because we meet doesn’t mean that we are skulking around the back corridors of the Attorney-General’s Department clasping sweaty palms with those same opponents. Meeting isn’t agreement.”

“Most, if not all of the discussions over the years have been conducted between the rightsholders and the ISPs. These have been fruitless. The rightsholders want all the benefits of remedial action, but want the ISPs to foot the bill. ISPs don’t want to pay to protect the rights of third parties.”

Noting that “the gap between the parties is considerable and unlikely to close”, Dalby countered claims that something evil might be going on in the meetings.

“I understand that it is not very exciting if a bunch of boring businessmen continue to meet and get nowhere – compared to the idea that some super secret cabal is conspiring to turn the goodies to the Dark Side, so that Australian consumers are sold into economic slavery controlled by the faceless henchmen of Hollywood,” he added.

But in any event the people still want transparency and now politicians say they want answers too. Yesterday, Greens Communications spokesperson Scott Ludlam filed an order in the Senate asking the government to disclose what went on during the most recent meeting held in February.

“Even with the best will in the world, simply inviting the intermediaries to come up with something that suits their collective commercial interests is hardly an encouraging recipe for looking after the public interest,” said Ludlam. “I acknowledge that ISPs have done their best to prevent predatory behaviour by rights holders in the past, but there’s no substitute for a diversity of views in a forum such as this.”

And that is the key to success – an open forum. It’s perhaps understandable that the rightsholders and ISPs don’t want their personal arguments heard in public. But by not allowing the people whose habits they hope to change get involved, it leads away from greater cooperation and understanding and towards suspicion and isolation. Piracy reductions definitely won’t be found at the end of that road.

Source: ISP: Secret Anti-BitTorrent Piracy Talks Are Failing

As with their treatment of sovereign nations the world over, the Americans have no qualms about interfering in our domestic politics and local legal systems. The kind of behaviour that, if reciprocated, would swiftly end the alliance. The latest front in this meddling is the crossover between file-sharing and intellectual property.

Individually, Australians can show enormous courage. Currently, an Australian is enduring a lengthy legal battle that may see him end up as an inmate at Guantanamo Bay, or worse.

Julian Assange and the Wikileaks organisation he help found shone a sterilising light on the behaviour of the US Embassy in Australia’s capital, Canberra. For his bravery Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, a trained lawyer, prejudiced any future legal action by prematurely labelling Assange’s actions “illegal.” She has since sacked the Attorney-General whose job it was to give legal advice on the Wikileaks matter, but the damage has been done and the comment has never been retracted.

While the Gillard Government was quick to shoot the messenger, it has remained eerily silent on the message – one of potential interference in domestic legal affairs by a foreign power and so-called ally.

The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers.

Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate.

The involvement of major American studios in the offensive was suppressed. “The case was filed by … the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its international affiliate, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), but does not want that fact to be broadcasted,” the US Embassy, Canberra wrote. “We will monitor this case … to see whether or not the ‘AFACT vs. the local ISP’ featured attraction spawns a ‘giant American bullies vs. little Aussie battlers’ sequel.”

The Wikileaks cables also revealed a number of Australian political power-brokers were US informers. Prominent union leader Paul Howes and Federal Senator Mark Aribib were both named in the cables as “protected” informants. Both were instrumental in elevating the current Prime Minister to office in 2009 in what many commentators described as a “bloodless coup.”

Had either been caught spilling secrets to any other national government, with the possible exception of Great Britain, they would have seen their reputations destroyed at best. At worst, been put on trial for treason. The mere hint of back-room dealings with Australia’s largest trading partner, China, has toppled political careers.

Senator Arbib was recently promoted to Assistant Treasurer by the Prime Minister he helped put in office. Without further leaks, we cannot know if Arbib still reports to his American handlers.

Prime Minister Gillard made her feelings towards America known when she addressed the US Congress in March, 2011 and proclaimed, somewhat sycophantically, “You can do anything.” This is not the diplomatic language of allies. It is the language of worship.

Many Australians believe we are special, that the US really does hold us in the highest regard, reinforced by frequent utterings from successive US administrations that America “has no better friend” than Australia. Unfortunately, such a reality is challenged by the even more frequent utterings that the US has no better friend than Canada, Great Britain, France, Italy, Israel, Japan, Poland and South Korea.

The “Australian” Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), a consortium of American movie studios with token Australian representation, began legal action against iiNet in November, 2008.

The MPA and US Embassy badly misjudged their target. In tenacious Australian fashion, iiNet put up the legal fight of their lives. AFACT lost the case and all subsequent appeals. Next month, the final episode of this long saga will culminate with a full ruling of the Australian High Court.

AFACT is already preparing for a loss in February by shifting its focus to lobbying the Australian Government directly. The process began behind closed doors late last year when meetings were held between AFACT, linked copyright industry lobbyists, the Federal Attorney-General’s department and a coalition of Australian ISPs. The voting public have not been told what was discussed or what plans have been developed.

If the High Court rules against AFACT and its Hollywood and US Government backers, as every lower court has done thus far, Australia will be faced with a test of national sovereignty. Only Australia’s Federal Parliament can overturn the decision.

With a Prime Minister visibly enamoured with the United States and known informers in the Federal Ministry, there is a strong likelihood any win for iiNet will herald changes in Australian law. It is unlikely those changes will be friendly to an open file-sharing culture.

Source: Australia: US Copyright Colony or Just a Good Friend?

But now a joint proposal from the Communications Alliance and ISPs including Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Optus, iPrimus and Internode, with collaboration from telecoms company AAPT, Ericsson Australia and the Internet Industry Association (IIA), lays out what the contributing parties believe is a workable middle-ground.

The 14-page proposal, titled ‘A Scheme to Address Online Copyright Infringement’, puts forth the framework for a “Notice Scheme” which aims to educate Internet subscribers when their connections are flagged as engaging in copyright infringement.

Unlike schemes elsewhere, particularly in neighboring New Zealand, there is no ‘graduated response’ being proposed by the ISPs for dealing with persistent infringers – that means no throttling, suspensions or disconnections. Instead, a warning notice scheme “with a strong emphasis on educating consumers” would be put in place, operating as follows:

The responsibility for monitoring file-sharing networks would fall at the feet of rightsholders who would only be able to do so using pre-approved and tested systems. Notices would have to be sent to ISPs within 14 days of an infringement being logged and ISPs would then have another 14 days to match the provided IP address with a customer account and send out an infringement notice.

Subscribers being contacted about a first instance of illicit file-sharing would receive an ‘Education Notice’ noting that an infringement had taken place on the account, but would not mention the content of the material that was shared. It is not clear why this omission was put in place, but one might imagine that those sharing pornography would be pleased at the inclusion of such a safeguard. The notice would also include information on where to obtain legal content.

After receiving an Education Notice, a 12 month period would then follow where if a subscriber was caught infringing again they would receive a ‘Copyright Infringement Notice’ (CIN). This time the content shared would be detailed in the notice.

When an account holder has been sent an Education Notice and three CINs, their ISP would then send a new notice called a ‘Discovery Notice’. These would note that the account holder has been unresponsive to previous notices, that rightsholders have been informed of this fact, and that further action could follow. It is at this point that the rightsholders would have to decide whether to get a court order to obtain the identity of the account holder in order to sue them under existing legislation.

At every step of the way, from Education, to Infringement to Discovery Notices, subscribers would be given opportunity to appeal.

“We believe the Notice Scheme can greatly reduce online copyright infringement in Australia, while protecting consumer rights, educating consumers about how to access legal online content and helping rights holders to protect their rights,” said Communications Alliance CEO, John Stanton.

“Equally important is the need for rights holders to ensure that consumers have access to legal and affordable content online, to reduce the motivation to source content in ways that might be illegal.”

Stanton notes that Australians have turned to illicit file-sharing because accessing material through official channels often means a wait of months compared with the release schedules of the rest of the world

“This difficulty, combined with a proliferation of access technologies, such as file-sharing software, has reportedly seen a growth in the frequency of unauthorised access to online content and breaches of copyright laws,” he notes.

The ISPs propose that the scheme runs for an 18 month trial to be followed by an independent evaluation on whether it has successfully influenced consumer behavior and if any changes should be made.

At this point some readers might be thinking that the proposals appear much more reasonable than those seen elsewhere, but it should be noted that while the ISPs may have thrown their ideas into the ring, they are just that – their ideas.

The other side of the debate – the rightsholders – aren’t mentioned as being party to these proposals even though the Communications Alliance statement says that the education-based Notice Scheme “flows” from discussions held during 2011 between ISPs, the government, and rightsholders.

And there are always problems. When one looks at the number of warnings the ISPs are offering to send out they are fairly limited. No ISP party to this proposal will be required to send out any more than 100 in a month, and all ISPs combined aren’t offering to send out any more than 10,000 total throughout the entire 18 month trial. Further, the thorny issue of apportioning costs is yet to be hammered out and they will be substantial.

It will be interesting to see what the likes of AFACT have to say about the proposal. On track record they will want any agreement balanced more in their favor and the above will be just the starting point for their negotiations.

Full details of the proposed scheme can be obtained here (pdf)

Source: Aussie ISPs Propose Anti-FileSharing Warning Notice Scheme

Although the site’s operations were frowned upon by a part of the BitTorrent community, its members saw MovieX as their prime source for fast downloads. This high-profile site didn’t go unnoticed by the Australian anti-piracy outfit AFACT, who launched an investigation into the site’s operators.

During December 2008, AFACT’s efforts resulted in the arrest of two brothers from Australia, the then 27-year old Hitesh Rama and his 23-year old brother Moneel Rama. The two were accused of facilitating the unauthorized transfers of 14 million movies and TV shows.

This week the case against the two brothers finally came to an end. Hitesh Rama was sentenced to 18 months in jail and his brother Moneel Rama received a 15 month jail sentence. However, Judge Richard Jones sent the two home on a $3000 good behavior bond, replacing the jail time with community service of 200 and 125 hours respectively.

TorrentFreak spoke to Moneel, who says he is glad that they escaped jail time, which he credits to the excellent work of their lawyers. But, at the same time he’s also very disappointed with how their case is being presented in the media.

“I would like to point out that me and my brother have learnt our lesson. However, half the things said in the press are untrue and the media has a way to blow these things out of proportions,” Moneel told TorrentFreak.

Aside from technicalities, such as the claim that the website was hosted at their home address instead of in a data center in The Netherlands, most of the inaccuracies deal with money related issues.

In common with many other private BitTorrent trackers, MovieX offered VIP memberships to its users in return for certain privileges. However, reports in the media suggest that people could only download files if they paid for a membership, which is certainly not the case.

“We never forced anyone to give us money or sign up for a ‘subscription’ service as described in the press. If we were to go back and ask any VIP member of the website if they were ever forced to give us money the answer would be a simple ‘no’,” Moneel said.

This is supported by the court papers which show that 6,000 transactions were made by MovieX members, totaling more than $110,000 in revenue. A large sum of money, but 6,000 transactions with more than 400,000 members means that less than 1.5% of all members paid money to the site.

And then there’s the claims that huge profits were made from the website. If we deduct the $50,000 that was frozen and confiscated by the authorities, a healthy revenue still remains. However, according to Moneel nearly all of the revenue went back into the site.

Moneel explained that the server costs added up to $1000 a month, and that they spent several hundred dollars each month on premium RapidShare and Megaupload accounts for the site. Also, the ‘owner’ of the site – better known as Loder – received a share of the donations for his work on the site. The rest of the money was kept in the brothers’ personal bank accounts, but would be invested in the site at a later stage.

According to the brothers there was never any intention to cash in at the expense of its users, or steal the money and run away. There were issues, and not everyone may have been a fan of the site, but the site was not setup as a business at all.

“MovieX was simply a hobby and we never had any intention of bringing the torrent community and my families name to shame. Obviously we had a lot of issues with our tracker problems and stolen VIP funds however that is the past, and the truth will always be out there.”

For the brothers the end of the case closes a controversial chapter in their lives. Both hold a steady job and they are ready to move forward.

“I wish to end this by saying I respect the Judge’s decision on our sentencing. Me and my brother can only go in one direction and that is forward and this will be something that is left behind,” Moneel concluded.

Source: MovieX BitTorrent Tracker Founders Escape Jail Time

It now seems that the building pressure has had an effect. After multiple phone calls, emails and even filing a freedom of information request with the Attorney General who quoted the report, it was finally made public a few hours ago.

So now that the report has been published, what are we dealing with? Well, it turns out that the ‘study’ is nothing more than a direct translation of one of the most questioned piracy reports that has ever been published.

It is entirely based on the EU-focused “Building a Digital Economy” report that was released by TERA Consultants last year. On the one hand this explains why a ‘real-estate” company could have easily penned it, as no original analysis was needed. But it also means that previous flaws were copied.

For one, the report suggests that there’s a direct correlation between Internet traffic growth and lost jobs. That is, the more traffic that is generated on the Internet, the more money will be lost. This correlation is 1 according to the report, which assumes that all growth in Internet traffic will increase piracy at the same rate.

Just to illustrate how twisted this line of reasoning is, by following the same logic one should conclude that by getting a 5 times faster connection, people will automatically watch 5 times more videos on YouTube, and visit 5 times as many websites. It’s easy to see that this makes no sense whatsoever.

This absurd logic is accompanied by the age old fable that there’s a direct correlation between piracy volume and lost sales. The report states that more traffic will mean more piracy and thus more lost revenue. It does not account for the fact that people might consume higher quality media which is greater in file-size. All projections are based on bandwidth and not the number of pirated goods.

For a complete list of fallacies, errors and misleading assumptions we refer to our previous coverage on the original report.

To us, it is absolutely incomprehensible that Australia’s Attorney General considers this report as a basis for shaping future copyright law. Aside from the fact that it was commissioned by the entertainment industry and carried out by a company that is not even four months old, it should be disregarded based on the horrible methodology.

The Australian Pirate Party, who helped with our attempts to uncover the report and the people behind it, has to be applauded for obtaining the report through a Freedom of Information request. We suspect that without this pressure, the document may have never been released so quickly.

“As taxpayers, as electors, we are entitled to transparency from our lawmakers,” Pirate Party Australia’s Rodney Serkowski told TorrentFreak.

“Now we see the reasons for their opacity. It is a study riddled with issues, and the Attorney General must now explain how he could be so easily mislead and rely on such industry propaganda, which is used as justification to impose stricter enforcement, compromising fundamental rights like privacy.”

The report, with all its flaws and shortcomings, once again reveals to what lengths the entertainment industry is willing to go in order to mislead politicians. A sad state of affairs, and let’s hope that now that it’s out, the Australian press will again pick up on it to address its validity.

Source: Secret Australian Piracy Report Revealed and Debunked

Yesterday yet another study was announced, this time by the Australian Content Industry Group, an umbrella organization of pro-copyright groups that conveniently doesn’t have a web presence. According to a news item the report claims that of the 22 million Australians, nearly 5 million are pirates.

Together, these downloaders were responsible for $900 million in losses the games, movies, films, music and software companies suffered in 2010, and that’s just the start. According to the report Australia’s National Broadband Network will cause the losses to rise to $5.2 billion by 2016.

As is often the case, the study itself is not available online, neither are the publishers responding to any requests to get a review copy. This makes it impossible to point out where the flaws are, but anyone with a calculator and some sense of economic reality will realize that the numbers are bogus.

If we believe the researchers, 6.5 million pirating Australians will be responsible for $5.2 billion in losses by 2016. This means that without piracy those people – including children and the unemployed – would spend an extra $800 per year, on average. Right.

Even if we assume that this would be even remotely possible, why would it go to $800 per head from the $187 they estimate now?

We suspect of course that the report makes some wild claims, such as arguing that every download is a lost sale. So with more and better broadband connections people will download more, and so cause more losses. Of course, this type of reasoning lies far from reality.

Insane, yes, but we’ve seen it before. A similar report published last year had a trend line where the ‘lost’ revenue because of piracy would actually exceed the actual revenue. Not impossible by definition, but highly unlikely. We expect that the Aussie report is based on a similar faulty trend.

Although the above suggests that even without seeing the full report, it’s not that hard to cast doubt on the validity of the claims, journalists simply pass it on without a critical note. This resulted in a fair bit of criticism in the comment section of the SMH article.

SMH wasn’t too happy with the critical readers and instead of addressing the concerns and valid commentary, they decided to close the comments section. How convenient.

Luckily there are still independent journalists who are rather more skeptical, and favor some analysis over a scoop, but they are in the minority. Most news outlets simply republished the industry-fed numbers without a critical comment.

This makes it easy for the entertainment industry outfits to influence public opinion with their fear-mongering propaganda. But even more importantly, these flawed and delusional reports are used as leverage to convince politicians to put the industry’s revenues before the rights of citizens and implement harsher anti-piracy legislation.

This time it will not be different. If only the industry representatives would get their heads out of the sand and address the gap between consumer demands in the digital age, and their offerings. That would really make a lasting impact.

Source: Fear Mongering and Delusional Piracy Report Upsets Aussies

“The Internet is a wonderful tool that is delivering benefits to increasing numbers of Australian families but the Government wants to find ways to make it safer, particularly for children. This report will assist the Government to deliver on its election commitment to create a safer online environment,” he said.

Ostensibly to protect children online, ISP filtering is just one part of the Australian government’s increasingly costly plan, but it has been roundly criticized for its projected lack of effectiveness.

Additionally there had been concerns that in trying to create a system to filter out material on the Internet, eventually such a system could be used by the “back door” to target copyright infringement issues too.

However, in March 2009 documents which appeared to be the ACMA-maintaned website blacklist leaked onto the Internet. From a list of more than 2,400 sites, just 2 torrent sites were included so maybe blocking torrent sites was never on the agenda.

Interestingly, Stephen Conroy now says that blocking or filtering P2P traffic was never a government target, even though many people were under the impression that it was.

According to a new report this morning, Senator Ludlam of the Greens said that Conroy had previously indicated that P2P filtering technology existed and would be trialled as part of the overall filtering plans.

In response and accusing Ludlam of misleading the public, yesterday Senator Conroy said, “..there has never been a suggestion by this government that peer-to-peer traffic would or could be blocked by our filter.”

Senator Ludlam said Conroy was “moving the goalposts” and that the whole filtering plan was misguided and had riled Internet users.

In reponse, Conroy’s office said that when he said P2P filtering had never been considered by the government, he was referring to “the mandatory part of the filter proposal.” ISP filtering would be an option for ISPs to consider and they could put forward their own proposals if they choose.

Blocking websites is not going to be an effective solution against the menace of child abuse. It is the individuals who operate and frequent such sites that need to be targeted and punished to the full extent of the law but due to a serious lack of funding, these misguided filtering “solutions” will always seem attractive to those who simply don’t understand how easily they are circumvented.

Source: Minister: BitTorrent Will Not Be Blocked By Aussie Filter

Last year the chief of ISP iiNet Michael Malone labeled Conroy as “the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years since the [Internet] industry has existed,” and this year the ISP pulled out of filtering trials, saying the filter would not work.

But criticism of Conroy don’t stop there. The proposed filtering system championed by Conroy – ostensibly for the protection of minors – isn’t even supported by those whose interests it claims to protect.

Last week Save the Children, Civil Liberties Australia and the National Children’s and Youth Law Center urged the government to abandon plans for Conroy’s filter saying that it will neither protect children from viewing explicit material, nor stop child pornography from being distributed. Let’s hope Conroy listens to these groups, because he doesn’t seem to listen to anyone else who says his plans are going nowhere.

Last night Senator Conroy unveiled a report entitled Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions while promising the government will “facilitate development of an appropriate solution to the issue of unauthorised file sharing”.

So what kind of imaginative, creative, pioneering ideas and solutions are available for Conroy to nurture and facilitate? From the report;

One solution proposed by copyright owners is a “three strikes” or “graduated response” proposal under which copyright owners would work together with ISPs to identify the ISP’s customers who are suspected of unauthorised file sharing and the ISP would then send a notice on behalf of the copyright owner to that customer advising of this allegation. After multiple notices, a series of escalated steps could be taken with respect to the customer’s account.

The “copyright owners” who submitted this proposal includes anti-piracy group AFACT, currently engaged in hugely expensive legal action against prominent ISP iiNet, blaming it for the copyright-infringing activities of its customers.

Good luck to Conroy in “facilitating” meaningful discussions between these outfits in the future. Their relationship must be at an all-time low already, and getting lower with every dollar-sapping court appearance in these difficult financial times.

But it’s not just the entertainment industry’s relationship with ISPs that’s proving problematic when attempting to find a “solution” to the piracy issue, it appears that ISPs have no time for Conroy either. Last week the Senator was awarded the accolade of “Internet Villain of the Year” by ISPs at the 11th annual Internet Industry Awards, even beating France’s President Sarkozy to the title.

Solving the piracy “problem” is hugely difficult and complex and will only be made more so by the already faltering relationships between parties who appear to have little respect for each other, even before the process begins.

The full report can be downloaded here (.pdf)

Source: Internet Villain Mulls 3 Strikes For Australian Pirates

“Total visits by Australians to BitTorrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz grew from 785,000 in April last year to 1,049,000 in April this year, Nielsen says. This is a year-on-year increase of 33.6 percent,” The Age wrote a few days ago.

This may sound like a lot of traffic, but since Nielsen reports the number of visits and not the unique visitors we expected it to be much higher. Luckily, Mininova was kind enough to give us some insight into their statistics so we could check how accurate Nielsen’s estimates are. The results are quite a shock.

When we look at the statistics of Mininova alone, we see that the site had 6,268,969 Aussie visits in April and a massive 33,162,846 Aussie page views. Compared to the same month in 2008 (4,144,556 visits), this is an increase of more than 50 percent.

So, the Australian visitors to Mininova alone are already 600% higher than Nielsen’s estimates of the total traffic to Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz. Unfortunately we don’t have any details on the methodology or sample Nielsen used, but it’s certainly not very representative.

Perhaps even more worrying, The Age attributes the surge in traffic to the economic downturn, without providing any evidence for a causal relationship between the two events. Over the past 5 years most BitTorrent sites have seen huge traffic increases every year, also when the economy was in an upswing.

Even more so, the money generated by (legal and illegal) use of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks is greater than the combined revenue of the various entertainment industry bodies who try to stop piracy. One could argue that without piracy the whole economy would collapse.

The downloading itself is not so much about cost saving. In Australia, BitTorrent is especially popular among those who want to catch up with US television shows that appear months or years later on TV down under. Money is not so much of an issue for them, they simply want to see the latest Lost or Heroes episodes.

Source: Nielsen Hugely Underestimates BitTorrent Traffic

According to a report, the Federal Opposition says it is “not surprised” that the government’s filtering scheme has been delayed. The latest update is that the trial will commence mid-January 2009, with the ISPs involved being announced at the same point.

iiNet, one of Australia’s largest ISPs, has been most vocal about the minimal chances of success for the filtering scheme, even going as far as to say that it was only participating in the trials to show that it will fail. iiNet chief Michael Malone even labeled the architect of the plan, Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy, as “the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years since the [Internet] industry has existed.”

An Australian Senate member since July 1993 and previously the Shadow Minister for Defense, Nick Minchin is the Shadow Minister for Broadband and he believes that the filtering system would drastically slow down the Internet.

He told ABC, “The laboratory trial that the Government conducted this year showed potential effect on speed of up to 87 per cent slowdown in the speed of the internet, he said, adding “And this is from the Government that wants to install a National Broadband Network so we can all have high speed broadband.”

“I think that’s a major flaw in the scheme but there are many, many others.”

So, three weeks from now the trial is supposed to start. It won’t take a fourth week to realize that it is doomed to fail.

Source: Australian Web and BitTorrent Filtering Scheme Delayed

Whereas some people may download a movie to avoid the cost, TV shows offer something different. People are generally able to watch these shows for free on regular TV, but still, due to superior convenience and greater availability, those same people choose to get their fix from BitTorrent instead.

In Australia right now, online piracy is a hot topic, with anti-piracy outfits going as far as trying to hold ISPs accountable for the infringing actions of their customers, and the ‘firewall’ of Australia threatening to target BitTorrent. But when it comes to deterring piracy it seems the big studios are blind to some of the small things they can do to make the situation better, instead of continually going to war with pirates – a war they simply cannot win.

The TV show Doctor Who, like many shows, has a ‘Christmas Special’. This episode, unsurprisingly, will air Christmas Day on the BBC in the UK. In it the Doctor will have one of his trademark re-incarnations, a very important event for fans of the series. The problem for Australian viewers is simple – ABC who have the rights to the show think that Christmas Day falls on January 25th 2009 down-under, as this is the date it will air there, officially at least.

But of course, Doctor Who fans know about BitTorrent, the show has appeared in our most pirated TV show lists and was even subject to a major ‘leak‘ of its own.

Thanks to ABC’s short-sightedness, thousands of Australians will pirate this episode of their favorite show just minutes after it finishes airing in the UK and a month ahead of its official launch. It’s not just The Doctor who is capable of time-traveling these days.

Source: Aussie ‘Doctor Who’ Fans Set to Time Travel With BitTorrent

However, up to now it was thought that the scheme would not be extended to other protocols and methods of online communication, such as those carried out via P2P. Today, however, that illusion is gone, as news surfaces BitTorrent will be targeted.

In a blog post entitled “Promoting a civil and confident society online”, Australian Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy responded to criticism from a user who posed this question: “Internet filtering won’t stop peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic—so why bother?”

The Government understands that ISP-level filtering is not a ‘silver bullet’. We have always viewed ISP-level filtering as one part of a broader government initiative for protecting our children online.

Technology is improving all the time. Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.

Stephen Conroy

The filtering scheme has many dissenters, including the chief of one of Australia’s largest ISPs, iiNet, who called it “ridiculous“, and branded Stephen Conroy “the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years since the [Internet] industry has existed.”

Of course, no decent person wants minors exploited or to see evidence of such online, but as a user of BitTorrent for many years, I have never, ever, come across anything that remotely resembles such material. Although it would be naive to say that it does not exist, BitTorrent is probably one of the last ‘places’ online people would visit to gain such material and, as such, i’m hugely disappointed it is to be included in this filter.

However, filtering BitTorrent is not as easy as Mr Conroy might have us believe, as will quickly become apparent when the results of the live pilots come in.

Source: Australian Internet Filter Will Target BitTorrent Traffic

The studios want iiNet to disconnect alleged infringers, but the ISP has refused to do so. Adrianne Pecotic, Executive Director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft said that the studios were forced to sue, since iiNet failed to take action against its customers. The case returns to the federal court shortly, but the lead up to this action proves interesting.

With the approval of AFACT, the Hollywood studios started a secret investigation back in June this year. After employing investigator Aaron Herps (and getting him to join up as an iiNet customer) and Copenhagen-based anti-piracy firm DtecNet for its software resources, they went online from 2 July to 30 October. Herps then actively shared copyright works via BitTorrent in a quest to gather evidence to prove that iiNet authorized the copyright-infringing activities of its own subscribers. But how would they prove this?

After the 18 week investigative period, the studios had collected the IP addresses of many thousands of iiNet subscribers, which were handed over to iiNet boss, Michael Malone, who later commented, “They send us a list of IP addresses and say ‘this IP address was involved in a breach on this date’. We look at that and say ‘well what do you want us to do with this? We can’t release the person’s details to you on the basis of an allegation and we can’t go and kick the customer off on the basis of an allegation from someone else.”

Crucially, the studios felt they had an ace up their sleeve in the shape of their investigator and now iiNet customer, Aaron Herp. Herps’ own ‘infringements’ were reported to iiNet along with everyone else’s, but of course, iiNet took no action against him, bolstering the claims that the ISP knew about piracy, but did nothing about it.

Interestingly, as Herps was actually authorized to share the movies and TV shows by the studios, he committed no copyright infringement, so if iiNet had disconnected him, they would have been acting incorrectly. It’s unclear what bearing this will have on the case.

Instead of taking direct action itself, iiNet handed all the evidence provided by the studios directly to the police. “So we say ‘You are alleging the person has broken the law; we’re passing it to the police. Let them deal with it’,” said Malone.

Ultimately it will be for the court to decide if iiNet ‘authorized’ the infringements, but the claims center around a number of assertions – that iiNet knew that its users were infringing copyright and that it took no action against them (i.e warnings, disconnection), that the ISP did not enforce its own terms of service (no sharing of copyright works) and that this liberal environment encouraged iiNet’s users to share more files.

According to Business Spectator, a hearing will take place tomorrow which will decide a date by which iiNet will have to file a defense, a defense they have promised to mount, vigorously.

Similar to elements of the DMCA, the ISP has a defense under Copyright Act 1968 – Sect 112E: A person (including a carrier or carriage service provider) who provides facilities for making, or facilitating the making of, a communication is not taken to have authorized any infringement of copyright in an audio/visual item merely because another person uses the facilities so provided to do something the right to do which is included in the copyright.

However, the Copyright Act 1968 – Sect 116AH states, “The carriage service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the accounts of repeat infringers.”

However, proving that someone is an infringer takes more than a simple allegation, and it could hardly be considered ‘appropriate’ to disconnect someone on this basis. Time for Justice Dennis Cowdroy to decide.

Source: Movie Studios Spied On ISP’s BitTorrent Users

Today, through an AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) press release, studios including Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, Inc. and the Seven Network (the top rated free-to-air broadcaster in Australia), announced that they are to sue iiNet for copyright infringement.

The companies state that they are suing iiNet for “failing to take reasonable steps, including enforcing its own terms and conditions, to prevent known unauthorized use of copies of the companies’ films and TV programs by iiNet’s customers via its network.”

Adrianne Pecotic, Executive Director of AFACT said that the studios were forced to sue, since iiNet failed to take action against its customers who the studios claim are committing copyright infringement. Chris Chard, Managing Director of Roadshow Entertainment, claims their titles Happy Feet, No Reservation and I am Legend had all been pirated by iiNet customers using BitTorrent.

The studios want iiNet to disconnect infringers, but up to now, iiNet has refused to do so. Mark White, chief operating officer at iiNet told APC that his company would consult with the Internet Industry Association (IIA) to formulate a response.

“Our view is pretty straightforward. We don’t condone or support piracy in any form, and people who choose to pirate content should face the force of the law,” he said. “This is an industry issue, and we’ve been talking with the IIA, and we’ll work with them in terms of handling it.”

iiNet’s CEO Michael Malone said that the company disputes AFACT’s claims that they refused to do anything about the problem, telling Computerworld, “They send us a list of IP addresses and say ‘this IP address was involved in a breach on this date’. We look at that say ‘well what do you want us to do with this? We can’t release the person’s details to you on the basis of an allegation and we can’t go and kick the customer off on the basis of an allegation from someone else’. So we say ‘you are alleging the person has broken the law; we’re passing it to the police. Let them deal with it’.”

Of course, it is not unusual for movie studios, copyright holders and commentators to skim over the details in claiming that it’s trivial to kill copyright infringement, it absolutely is not. Just this week, Mike Mulligan of Jupiter Research said in a piece entitled “Why Music Can’t ‘Just Be Free’”, that all P2P developers (and presumably ISPs in this case) have to do is “support their claims off innocence by embedding filtering mechanisms into their apps.” TorrentFreak wrote to Mike offering to present precise details of his suggestions to Vuze, LimeWire, Shareaza and Morpheus but, unsurprisingly, there has been no response.

The problem is clearly not lost on Michael Malone: “I think they genuinely believe that ISPs have a secret magic wand that we are hiding and if we bring it out we can make piracy disappear just by waving it.”

The legal action against iiNet was filed in Australia’s Federal Court on November 20th (today), and the proceedings will continue December 20th 2008.

Source: Movie Studios Sue ISP Over BitTorrent Piracy

“DVD and other piracy can now be more profitable than drug trafficking,” AFACT’s director of operations Neil Gane told The Australian. “That’s why crime organizations are going into it.”

It might not sound familiar to some of you, but a similar claim was made some four years and 9500 miles away, in the UK. Back then, during a campaign called “piracy is a crime” they made similar allegations (see the top of this page, court. wayback machine), allegations that didn’t stand up to scrutiny back then, when we first encountered them.

Do these? Well, the article in question makes use of the infamous LEK study, and even the MPAA knows it’s inaccurate (pdf). So, it’s not exactly off to the best of starts. Unfortunately, that’s also the only start. Despite a trawl of the websites and press releases put out by the two organizations (the other being Foxtel), there is only one recent link (doc) between drugs and ‘piracy’ and that is the prosecution of ONE MAN just over a month ago, for cultivating cannabis, and what is described as ‘multiple copyright offenses’.

So, we’ve gone from one guy, with 3,300 movies+TV shows and growing some cannabis (total punishment, 7 month suspended sentence, and a 2 year good behavior order) to Organized Crime. Despite the utter failure of the similar campaign in the UK years earlier (where the only thing remaining of the campaign is the ‘You wouldn’t steal a…” advert) Australia seems determined to try and make it work.

However, there is a plus side, in that AFACT have established a market price it believes consumers feel to be the worth of a DVD. In all their estimations of yearly capacity, they give a ‘street value’ of roughly $5AUS, which is about $4.77 US (3 Euros, or £2.40). In this they differ from the campaign in the UK, where the value given was some 20 times greater. In this, while telling lies, they are also more truthful.

In the end, no ‘criminal gang’ will forego their drugs, weapons or other lucrative money-making operations for DVD piracy. The reasoning is as plain as it is simple. With drugs, or guns they have small, highly valuable goods that can’t be easily obtained elsewhere. As the world becomes increasingly connected, and peer-to-peer becomes simpler to use, more reliable, less time consuming AND more powerful, the potential returns on selling bootleg DVDs reduces, ask Tony. Ten years ago, people had dial-up, and hard drives were maybe big enough for 2-3 DVDs. Now you can buy terabyte hard drives, and even the TorrentFreak researcher, living in the middle of rural Georgia, 10 miles from the nearest shops, has an 8Mbit connection.

The reasons for comparisons become clear when you hear the comments of Foxtel’s head of Fraud, Mark Mulready (a ‘former police prosecutor and detective’), who told The Australian “Police should have all the same investigative tools to fight piracy they currently have for organised drug trafficking or money laundering,” so, as usual, it’s about not having to spend time and money on civil cases, but having the taxpayer foot the bill, and the ability to use law enforcement to patch their business model.

Rehashing failed campaigns is a sign that the industry has no new ideas, and is desperately trying to avoid dealing with the root of the problem , themselves and their greed. When even the police are so into ‘piracy’, that there are too many to prosecute, it’s time to stop sticking your head in the sand, and deal with the causes.

Source: Australian Drug Mafia to Sell Pirated DVDs?

The origin of these movies is not clear, but it is probable that they’ve been downloaded via p2p at some point, either on these systems, or on the personal systems of officers and transferred over.

Senior officials of the SA police force have been made aware of the findings, including its commissioner Mel Hyde. However, police sources have told press that there will not be any investigation into this, citing the large numbers of police officers involved.

The Australian Federation against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has said it will write to the commissioner to seek an explanation, presumably as to why the police officers are being let off with what it considers a heinous crime. Quite ironically, AFACT boasts of “working closely with police” – perhaps this closeness has shown the police officers involved just how unimportant and meaningless this so-called ‘crime’ is in the grand scheme of things.

If the officers do go unpunished, it could create a favorable precedent for filesharers in South Australia. If police officers, who are expected to be held to a greater level of accountability regarding the law, show this level of contempt for the current copyright laws, are unpunished, it will make it harder to convince a court that regular citizen should be punished for similar acts.

On the other hand, if the officers are punished under the law, which allows for upto AUS$60,500 (About US$55,700 or 35,500Euro) per infringement and up to 5 years imprisonment, the ability to effectively police the state will be severely diminished.

Either way, this case will bring to a head the vastly disproportionate penalties for an act that, as yet, has never been proven to be even financially damaging. One thing is certain, when even the police officers join large numbers of citizens in flouting such laws, the law’s place in society should be called into serious question.

The South Australian police force had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

Source: Australian Police Caught Pirating Movies

The Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) in conjunction with the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) have been pressurizing Australian Internet Service Providers to take action against those it accuses of infringing its copyrights.

They have informed ISPs that they require them to send warning notices to their customers informing them of their infringing behavior and warning of the likely consequences. They have also issued demands that ISPs disconnect their customers from the internet, should they be accused of sharing copyright works.

According to The Age, Sabiene Heindl – General Manager of MIPI – is signaling a new strategy after Australian ISPs dug their heels in and refused to co-operate with MIPI’s demands. The Internet Industry Association (IIA) wrote to MIPI and explained that they felt they weren’t responsible for the actions of its customers and should not be required to monitor them, effectively refusing to become the industry’s copyright police.

In a letter, the IIA suggested that copyright holders should look for their rights to be enforced by using the existing tools provided by the Australian courts and copyright law.

The IIA quite rightly believes that the labeling of someone as an infringer should only be done by the courts, not by an organization such as MIPI or AFACT, a point outlined in its letter: “The distinction between an infringer and an alleged infringer has been raised as an important legal standard which ought not be undermined by us.”

In response, Heindl explained: “We would hope that the ISPs and the record companies could come up with an alternative solution. That said, if that solution cannot be reached, and at this stage it’s because of the ISPs refusing to play ball, then we may have no alternative other than to take legal action.”

Originally created to curtail physical piracy, 2004 saw MIPI involved in high drama when it raided the offices and home addresses of people involved with Sharman Networks and Brilliant Digital Entertainment. Two universities and 4 ISPs were also raided during the search for evidence to support their case against KaZaA.

In 2005, MIPI was restructured to concentrate on educating the public about file-sharing, although this didn’t stop them raiding an ISP in their quest to get a BitTorrent hub shut down.

It’s likely that 2007/8 will see MIPI ‘educating’ file-sharers with the threat of lawsuits which are hugely expensive, have been tried extensively in the United States and generally, do not work.

Source: Australians Next on the P2P Lawsuit Hitlist

The Business Software Association, an international software body, claimed that in the year 2005 piracy in Australia cost them $361 million. The draft says these figures are “unverified and epistemologically unreliable.” It even goes so far as to call some of the stats used by copyright holders “absurd,” and adds that “of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law.”

According to the draft, the RIAA’s Australian arm, the MIPI did not know how they calculated piracy stats, because the IPFI never told them. Strange? Maybe that’s just how things work with international organisations.

The reasoning behind the statements in the draft is that anti-piracy organisations calculate losses by counting each pirated good that is sold. They are making the assumption that each person who buys a pirated CD, for example, would have bought an original one instead. This cannot be backed up, as many of those people might not have been able to buy, or might not have bought the original CD.

The draft concluded with a statement asking for statistics that cannot be verified to be withdrawn. “Either these statistics must be withdrawn or the purveyors of these statistics must supply valid and transparent substantiation.”

The truth on the other hand: Why Most Artists Profit from Piracy!

Source: Australian govt draft says piracy stats are made up