Site blocking ineffective at stopping piracy: IA

In the wake of Village Roadshow commencing court action seeking to have an alleged piracy site blocked, Internet Australia has renewed its calls for a rethink of current government activity around piracy.

Village Roadshow has filed a federal court case seeking to have SolarMovie.ph blocked under Australia’s new site blocking legislation.

The company is seeking orders laying out the technical measures ISPs would implement to block the website, which would likely involve DNS filtering or cache poisoning.

But Internet Australia CEO Laurie Patton noted that international experience has shown that site blocking is more of a PR stunt than an effective solution to piracy.

“You close them down and they reappear in no time on another site,” he said. “Not only will site blocking not stop unlawful downloading, it will cause inconvenience to ISPs and additional operating costs that will inevitably be passed on to consumer.”

He also noted the recent decision by the lawyers representing the rights holders for the movie Dallas Buyers Club to withdraw its legal challenge seeking to force iiNet to reveal the identities of over 4700 iiNet customers accused of illegally sharing the film via bittorrent.

Patton said such cases, coupled with the inability to resolve long-running disagreements over the government’s proposed warning notice scheme, demonstrate the need to accept the pointlessness of current strategies to deal with piracy.

“There is little evidence from overseas that these warning notice schemes actually work and they are quite expensive to administer. Understandably, then, why would either party want to bear the costs of running something that isn’t going to achieve much? It is not surprising, therefore, that the copyright notice scheme hasn’t materialised,” he said.

“It would be in the best interests of content producers, as opposed to content distributors, if we all accepted that the main reason why most people unlawfully download is that they can’t get what they want through legitimate channels.”

Patton also noted that the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) recently published a watch list of countries it believes need to do a better job of protecting the interests of the copyright industry.

“Guess what? Australia isn’t on the watch list, so clearly we are not seen as a major offender by world standards,” he said.

Image courtesy of Michell Zappa under CC