TorrentFreak » Myles Peterson

Pirates and Wikileaks Share Battlefield In Aussie Election

Myles Peterson — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 21:35:04 +0000

In September, debutante parties representing both will face off at the Aussie ballot box.

In the purple corner, the Rick Falkvinge inspired Pirate Party. In the black corner, the newly formed Wikileaks Party with Julian Assange himself running as candidate-in-chief for a senate seat in the southern state of Victoria.

Despite currently wallowing in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy and facing constitutional hurdles, Assange’s senate candidacy is alive and kicking. Victoria is also expected to deliver the Pirate Party a small, but statistically significant vote. Australians have a soft spot for Wikileaks and piracy – though its yet to be determined how this popularity will translate into election votes.

Australia operates two parliaments at a national level, much like the United States and Britain. The lower house uses an electoral system similar to the United Kingdom’s House of Commons or the United State’s House of Representatives, candidates slugging it out for a single seat in numerous electorates.

But Australia’s senate, where the Pirates and Wikileaks will face-off, has more in common with many of Europe’s parliaments and operates on a state-by-state proportional representation system.

Then, just to make things interesting, each voter is allowed to mark down preferences. If a voter’s primary candidate does not achieve the required quota to get elected, their vote spills down to the second preference, then third, forth, fifth and so on, until it finds a candidate with enough votes to achieve a quota. The system has seen all manner of minor parties snare a seat in the Australian senate, from hard-right religious zealots and large voting blocks of Greens through to a blacksmith.

Victoria will elect six senators in September. If voting patterns follow the 2010 election, four or five seats will be gobbled up by entrenched major parties, leaving the remaining one or two to be squabbled over by Greens and other minors and independents.

It is during these squabbles that preferences become critical. Our blacksmith managed to get himself elected in Victoria with just under two per cent of the primary vote. Preferences did the rest.

The final piece of the puzzle is that parties can officially direct their faithful on how to allocate preferences. It’s not mandatory, but it is strongly followed by most voters because ticking a box that says “what the party I like wants” is much easier than numbering upwards of sixty candidates individually. Voting is mandatory in Australia. Bored and disaffected voters like to get the process over and done with as quickly as possible.

Wikileaks and the pirates are yet to announce what preference “deals” they will be making with other parties. Major party strategists agonize over these deals because they can be critical in winning a tightly contested seat. The major parties often preference each other last while doing deals with minors such as the Greens.

The Wikileaks and Pirate Parties both appeal to a similar demographic of voters – often young, technologically-minded people who believe in open government. But there are points of difference.

Some Pirate Party members are openly hostile towards Wikileaks. Type Assange into Pirate Party Australia’s very open IRC chat rooms and you will be hit with a range of opinions from full support to total derision.

The Pirate Party will be putting preference deals to a membership vote later this year. Party vice president Simon Frew said he could not predict how the voting would go.

“It would be safe to say both Wikileaks and the Greens would be preferenced highly and the major parties significantly lower due to their appalling policies on copyright and patents, surveillance and civil liberties,” Mr Frew told Torrentfreak.

The newly formed Wikileaks Party is not yet ready to discuss how preferences will be allocated, if at all, according to insiders.

Some Pirate Party supporters have worried openly about how the looming match-up could split the vote, denying both parties a chance at election. Preferencing away from each other could potentially damage both.

Falkvinge and Assange probably never imagined when they had drinks together back in August 2010 that the movements each has spearheaded would end up contesting an Australian election. Photos from that night depict easy-going, natural allies.

Three years on, the Wikileaks and Pirate Parties are set for a political fight, but symbolic of the ideals of both – sharing not competing – may prove the best strategy.

About The Author

Myles Peterson is a journalist and writer featured in Australia’s Fairfax Media, the ABC and News Ltd. He is currently editing a local newspaper while completing a novel on Australian politics entitled Hollowland.

Follow @mylespeterson

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Australian Pirate Party Sets Course for Parliament

Myles Peterson — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:18:28 +0000

In a mere six years, Sweden’s nascent Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) has grown from fringe group into a potent global political force.

Some libertarian movements echo aspects of the Pirate Party’s agenda, mainly its advocacy of free speech and open government. Other political groups, such as the European founded Greens, touch on elements of the party’s progressive thinking.

But the Pirate Party stands alone in driving a holistic vision of an information-based society, governed by principles of transparency in business and government while protecting the privacy of individuals.

Despite the common misconception, the legally protected torrenting of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster is not the party’s goal.

Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge, a frequent contributor to Torrentfreak, envisions a society comfortable in its new-found abilities to communicate horizontally. In a 2006 speech given during the first wave of attacks against perennially resilient torrent site, the Pirate Bay, Falkvinge declared copyright industries and hostile political forces could never hope to force the file-sharing genie back into the bottle.

“Yes, we’re pirates. But one who thinks being a pirate is a shame is mistaken. It’s something we’re proud of,” Falkvinge said.

“Because we’ve already seen what it means to be without central control. We’ve already tasted, felt and smelled the freedom of being without a central monopoly of culture and knowledge. We’ve already learnt to read and write – and we’re not about to forget how to read and write, just because it’s not fit in the eyes of the media of the yesteryear.”

The Pirate Party’s swift global expansion since those heady days of 2006 has finally come to Australia’s capital, a tiny city-state unimaginatively titled the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). The city itself is named Canberra, taken from the local people’s language, which means simply, “meeting place.”

Canberra represents a rare opportunity for the Australian wing of the Pirate Party – no other electorate contains such a unique set of factors that, when combined, deliver the party a genuine shot at gaining its first parliamentary representation in Australia.

Victory is by no means certain. The party faces many challenges, such as finding the right candidates and overcoming internal growth pains. Yet Canberra’s use of a proportional voting system combined with a progressive leaning population makes it fertile grounds for the new movement.

A democratic barrier exists in many parts of the world, blocking small parties and independents from electoral success. This barrier is most pronounced in countries like the United States. The US voting system gives enormous power to entrenched contenders and tends to crystallise democratic representation into the hands of just two groups. In practical terms, Democrats and Republicans reign supreme. So-called “third party candidates” are regularly shut out of the process because they have no chance of being elected.

European parliaments are often very different, generally favouring proportional voting. It is because of these systems that smaller and newer parties, such as the Greens, and more recently the Pirate Party itself, have been able to enter parliaments and influence governments.

Various Australian state, territory and federal parliaments employ a dizzying array of different voting systems.

Canberra has its own small parliament, served by a tiny electorate of a just few hundred thousand, yet its legislature enjoys all the constitutional powers of an Australian state government. Canberra also employs a modified proportional voting system, which has delivered a range of different parties and candidates into the local legislative assembly since it first came into existence in 1989. Currently, a “candy-cane” alliance of Greens and the union-movement based Labor Party form government. Canberra is due to hold its elections later this year.

“The drive for creating an ACT branch of Pirate Party Australia was [the] election due in October,” ACT Pirate Party spokesman Stuart Biggs told Torrentfreak.

“The proportional representational system that the ACT uses is similar to the representational systems in Europe where Pirate Parties have already seen electoral success, so it stands to reason that it’s a good place for Pirate Party Australia to focus it’s attention in these early stages,” Biggs said.

Biggs and his Pirate Party colleagues are currently engaged in a membership drive for the new ACT branch. Since launching two weeks ago, they have garnered a quarter of the one hundred Canberra-based members needed by June 30 to register as an official party.

The political establishment in Canberra is unlikely to view the Pirate Party as any kind of real electoral threat. The local voting population is notoriously wedded to the public-service friendly Labor Party, which currently rules at both a local and federal level.

But Australian style democracy is a strange beast by world standards. The final piece of the puzzle involves compulsory voting. Australia is one of the few countries in the world to force all adult citizens to vote, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of (, or even an interest in,) politics. Combine that with proportional voting, a known love of piracy, a progressive electorate and the words “Pirate Party” on the ballot sheet, and Canberra may just deliver the establishment a surprise come October.

About The Author

Myles Peterson was on the periphery of the Melbourne Underground in the early 90s, sharing games that were unavailable or censored in Australia. Peterson’s former employers include the Departments of Prime Minister & Cabinet, Environment and Health, law firm Mallesons and most recently Fairfax Media where he was a journalist.

Follow @mylespeterson

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Lengthening Arm of Uncle Sam’s ‘Pirate’ Justice

Myles Peterson — Sat, 05 May 2012 22:38:15 +0000

“Because today’s threats do not recognise national boundaries, our responses must also transcend borders,” Ms Napolitano told her hosts in a speech overly dominated by assurances the US would respect the privacy of Australian citizens.

The legal reach of the US government has lengthened considerably over the past decade. Under the banner of fighting terrorism, law after law has been introduced, up to and including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security itself. Allies of the United States have signed up to bi-lateral and multi-lateral treaties giving that country enormous power over non-US citizens.

The perceived imbalance of many of these arrangements is starting to draw official protests. British Parliamentarian Dominic Raab recently stated, “Richard O’Dwyer [is] subject to US extradition orders based on [his] actions in Britain. Yet, no American has ever been extradited for alleged offences committed on US soil. It smacks of double standards, and strengthens the case for extradition reform.”

Richared O’Dwyer‘s alleged crimes involve facilitating copyright infringement via the website TVShack.net. Midway through 2010, Napolitano’s department used America’s control of the .net domain name register to extraterritoriality seize the TVShack domain.

Just under a year later the US Justice Department sought to have O’Dwyer extradited for alleged breaches of US law. O’Dwyer’s supporters have strongly questioned why a UK citizen can be sent to the US, despite having committed no crime on US soil for an offence that has generally been considered a civil, not criminal, matter.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, German celebrity hacker and internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is also fighting extradition to the United States for allegedly breaching the copyright of US corporate interests. Unlike the 23-year-old O’Dwyer, Dotcom has gained global media attention thanks to a high profile and limited access to considerable resources.

While facing extradition to Sweden from the UK, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange also fears the ever lengthening arm of US justice. Sweden holds a “special” arrangement with the United States which allows that country to temporarily surrender people into American custody. Assange and his supporters believe that should he be sent to Sweden, he will be promptly handed to the US authorities. (Although it should be asked why Assange does not fear he will be extradited by the British Government themselves.)

Should either the UK or Sweden fail to do America’s bidding, the Australia Government reportedly has a contingency plan. In March this year, the Australian federal parliament passed the Extradition and Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation Amendment Act, lowering the bar to extradite its own citizens while removing many previously held defences.

Combined with so-called “Wikileaks Amendments” and other expansions of their powers in the post 911 era, Australia’s spy agencies are now equipped to legally snoop on Australian citizens and share the information internally. Napolitano’s visit and the agreements she and Australian Attorney-General Nicola Roxon signed allow for much greater sharing of that information with the US government.

Australia’s Rama Brothers may consider themselves fortunate their copyright infringement trial began before this bilateral legal regime was expanded to its current form. Both received suspended jail sentences under the Queensland legal system, unlike Britain’s Richard O’Dwyer who faces a lengthy sentence in a foreign country. Future Rama Brothers will conceivably be shipped off to the United States for trial and punishment, with little to no ability to challenge an extradition under Australian law.

Last month the Australian High Court emphatically rejected an attempt by Hollywood studios to have local ISPs held responsible for the file-sharing activities of their customers. The legal precedent is binding in Australia and influential in countries who share a similar legal system such as India, Canada and the UK.

Through bypassing the courts and going straight to our legislators, who are arguably compromised in their ability to deal with the United States, the American Government is achieving the outcomes Hollywood lawyers and lobbyists could not. If Australian law will not deliver the results entities such as the RIAA and MPAA are pleased with, it can be circumnavigated by applying US law instead.

We have reached a point in Australia where citizens can be arrested and extradited to the United States based on information supplied by Australian spies for breaches of US law on Australian soil. Australia has effectively signed away its right to govern its own in matters of copyright infringement when those matters overlap the interests of the United States.

About The Author

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Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

iiNet: ISP Not Liable For BitTorrent Piracy, High Court Rules

Myles Peterson — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:18:01 +0000

In what became known as the iiTrial, the marathon four-year legal battle that began in November 2008, a consortium of Hollywood Studios with token Australian representation going under the banner of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) took iiNet to court.

The case navigated several layers of the Australian court system, with iiNet winning the initial ruling and all subsequent appeals, before finally ending up in front the High Court in December last year.

The thrust of the case hung on whether iiNet had willingly authorized the copyright infringements of its customers. Lower courts found that iiNet had no duty to police its own networks, even when AFACT supplied so-called proof of infringement by its customers.

Just moments ago, the High Court unanimously dismissed AFACT’s final appeal.

“The Court observed that iiNet had no direct technical power to prevent its customers from using the BitTorrent system to infringe copyright,” a summary of the Court’s findings read.

“Rather, the extent of iiNet’s power to prevent its customers from infringing the appellants’ copyright was limited to an indirect power to terminate its contractual relationship with its customers.”

The High Court further noted that the warning notices previously sent to iiNet by AFACT when the ISP’s customers allegedly infringed copyright “..did not provide iiNet with a reasonable basis for sending warning notices to individual customers containing threats to suspend or terminate those customers’ accounts.”

Since the notices were inadequate, iiNet could not be considered to have authorized the infringements of its subscribers when it did not act on them.

The High Court sits at the pinnacle of Australia’s legal system and its rulings cannot be appealed. Today’s decision forms a binding legal precedent on all lower Australian courts and will be taken into consideration by judges in countries with comparable legal systems such as India, Canada and the UK.

All of this factored into the reasoning of AFACT and its chief sponsor the MPAA to take legal action against iiNet, as revealed by US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in November 2011. The US Ambassador to Australia in 2008, Robert McCallum, reported back to Washington that iiNet was chosen because it was judged too small to put up a decent legal fight. In the cable, the Ambassador prophetically cautioned the coming legal tussle could be perceived as “…the giant American bullies [versus] little Aussie battlers….”

AFACT could never have known Wikileaks would out the plot, or that the legal case would so spectacularly backfire. Today’s decision will hurt Hollywood’s copyright enforcement agenda on multiple levels. Alongside the setting of an unwanted legal precedent, AFACT has been dealt a significant public relations blow in its ongoing lobbying efforts in Australia.

Prior to the decision, AFACT’s Managing Director Neil Gane told TorrentFreak via email, “Regardless of the outcome [today], the landscape has changed. In the three years since the case commenced, legislators, regulators and courts around the world have recognized that ISPs must play a central role in preventing online copyright theft.”

Anticipating a loss in the case, AFACT began lobbying government and ISPs behind closed doors last December. The process has been widely criticised for a lack of public consultation. While the Australian government has suggested it prefers an industry agreed model for combating copyright infringement to legislation, leaks have revealed AFACT and its lobbying partners have been pressuring for an outcome that forces ISPs into a policing role.

The option of having ISPs forced into that role through the courts has been blunted by today’s High Court decision and it can be expected AFACT will step up their lobbying efforts of law-makers directly.

Update: Both parties held separate conferences following the emphatic 5-0 High Court decision. The mood in the iiNet camp, who stand to recoup $6 million in legal fees, was jubilant.

“We’re very pleased with the results announced in the High Court,” iiNet Chief Regulatory Officer Steve Dalby said. “The five-nil judgement puts us in a much stronger position.”

AFACT’s Neil Gane was expectedly downbeat. “Both judgements in this case recognize that copyright law is no longer equipped to deal with the rate of technological change we have seen since the law of authorization was last tested,” he said.

iiNet CEO Michael Malone was keen to stress the importance of the win. “This is a world first case. No case has gone to judgement in the highest court in the land. I’ve had text messages and emails from people from all over the world,” he said.

Mr Malone said he looked forward to finding solutions to content piracy, but said a large part of the problem was content creators’ unwillingness to make their products available in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Expressing a personal fondness for hit US TV series Game of Thrones, Mr Malone lamented he was not able to access the latest episodes of the show legally in Australia.

Both Mr Malone and Mr Dalby expressed concerns about AFACT’s methods for collecting data on alleged infringers. “I dont’ have any confidence in the notices [of alleged infringement] that we’ve seen,” Mr Dalby said.

Mr Malone added that by standing up to AFACT and its Hollywood backers iiNet had enhanced its reputation in the Australian marketplace. “I’d argue [the court case has] positively impacted our reputation … Our role is to connect customers to the internet and with each other. We’re not going to remove your access without some sort of independent review,” he said.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Hypocritical Use of Piracy As a Corporate Weapon

Myles Peterson — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 13:31:56 +0000

Troubled international media giant News Corporation felt the ice crack beneath its feet this week after years of enduring ill winds blowing from phone hacking scandals in the United Kingdom and United States.

The Australian Financial Review and the BBC’s Panorama programme combined to publish a four-year investigation into the operations of News Corporation subsidiaries, unveiling damaging claims of a plot to facilitate and encourage piracy with the aim of crippling pay-television rivals.

The allegations cast shadows across the main-stream media landscape, with implications for the conduct of news outlets and the arguments of anti-piracy lobby groups through to the structure of the pay-television landscape itself.

The reaction of News Corporation’s 81-year-old Australian founder and CEO was swift. Rupert Murdoch used his new love of micro-blogging platform Twitter to rubbish the claims, the publishers and make implied threats of legal action against those raising the allegations.

Murdoch’s sensitivity is understandable. The negative publicity generated by earlier phone hacking scandals could be alleviated in part by suggesting that if immoral – even illegal – activity had taken place, it occurred during the pursuit of journalism, however tawdry or overzealous.

Using piracy as a corporate weapon to damage competitors contains no such narrow mountain trail to the moral high ground. Worse, it undermines a global campaign against piracy led by Hollywood lobby groups such as the MPAA, of whom News Corporation is a major member via its entertainment subsidiary, FOX.

In Australia, the web becomes more tangled, ensnaring a current consultation process to control and limit file-sharing. Leading up to a secretive series of meetings held between the Australian Attorney-General’s department, copyright monopoly lobby groups and internet service providers, News Corporation unleashed an attack on media piracy via its local publications, as noted at the time by Torrentfreak.

The articles were backed by a study commissioned by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), of whom News Corporation is a member, again via its subsidiary FOX.

AFACT now has the onerous task of keeping a straight face during the closed-door discussions while it argues for the criminalisation of not-for-profit piracy as a major backer and publicity partner is embroiled in a corporate piracy scandal.

The Australian pay-television market is small compared to its foreign counterparts. Until last week it contained only two major players whom largely broadcast the same limited number of channels. The tiny size of the industry has been blamed on everything from over regulation to rampant file-sharing. The new piracy allegations suggest a more sinister story.

Last Friday, dominant player Foxtel, part owned by News Corporation, came a step closer to acquiring its smaller rival Austar in a $AU1.9 billion take-over which will deliver Foxtel a virtual monopoly of the cable-television market in Australia.

Moves from internet outsiders such as FetchTV, Netflix and local Netflix-clone Quickflix have made inroads into the medium, but all offer limited content and Netflix currently requires Australians to circumnavigate geoblocking. Television content sold via platforms such as Itunes is also routinely geoblocked and/or suffers from unexplained inflated pricing.

The US Embassy in Canberra views limited options for accessing content as a driver of piracy in Australia. Australia’s stunted pay-television market is part of this problem. Many popular television series appear months or years late, or not at all. The free-to-air television market has suffered decades of audience and revenue decline and can no longer afford to regularly syndicate high-cost content.

Australians are left in a shifting half-light of what is globally popular, forever reading about new content online, watching the trailers, inadvertently seeing spoilers in social media – while often being left with no legal way of participating.

The allegations against News Corporation in Australia have not been heard in any court, and may never be – the Australian Federal Police are reluctant to get involved, despite Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy urging the claims to be investigated.

If the Panorama and Australian Financial Revue’s claims are substantiated and it is proved one of the largest media corporations in the world engaged in predatory piracy to damage rivals, the fallout will be large. News Corporation bases much of its content sales on securing paywalls and selling entry. Competitors, audiences and governments will not be happy if it is established that News Corporation’s other business model was predicated on coldly and clinically facilitating the piracy of the content of rivals.

About The Author

Myles Peterson is an Australian Journalist & Writer.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Department For ACTA

Myles Peterson — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:16:34 +0000

The proposed treaty has generated heat across the globe, from the streets of Poland to the parliament of Europe and Mexico, to the social media back-channels of ACTA’s primary driver, the United States of America.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Australia: US Copyright Colony or Just a Good Friend?

Myles Peterson — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:05:41 +0000

The foundation-stone of Australia’s defence policy is our alliance with the United States. Known as the ANZUS treaty, on paper this alliance guarantees mutual defence. In practice, the friendship is far from equal.

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.

About The Author

Myles Peterson is an Australian Journalist & Writer.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.