The Internet Society of Australia has called on the Federal Government to delay site blocking legislation while undertaking an independent study of the real extent of video piracy and its purported costs to the local industry.
The Internet Society acknowledges and supports the intellectual property rights of content owners and their desire to address the issue of unauthorised access. However we regard the Government’s proposed response as disproportionate and premature.
"We support the need for content to be made available speedily, at reasonable cost and on multiple devices and that the community needs to be educated about the damage piracy does", said CEO Laurie Patton, "However, we do not believe that there is sufficient international proof that piracy can be eliminated via government regulation.
"Our concern is that ad hoc government interventions such as the proposed site blocking legislation will not address the problem but will create adverse unintended consequences that are entirely counterproductive and potentially damaging to the Internet."
In 2013 it was reported that ASIC "inadvertently" blocked access to around 250,000 innocent websites when attempting to block one particular site it alleged was defrauding people.
"This is the sort of unintended damage that we risk reoccurring if the site blocking legislation goes through", Mr Patton added.
"Requiring more than 400 ISP's to manually block websites will incur significant costs that will inevitably have to be passed on to consumers by way of increased charges."
The first response should be timely release of content. “Internationally this is regarded as the best way to discourage unauthorised access. Here in Australia we have only just seen the introduction of streaming (SVOD) services, so it is too early to be taking the "blunt instrument" approach of site blocking.
"The Internet Society believes that we should wait for at least a year and have a reputable independent organisation undertake research to see if there is a real problem needing action. In the meantime we should introduce a national public awareness campaign to encourage people to access content via legitimate means.
"We also support the Copyright Notice Scheme Code which is about to be introduced. This is the first step in educating people about piracy.
The Copyright Notice Scheme will see ISPs sending up to three written warnings to households where downloading of pirated content is alleged to be occurring.