alex.cvitanovic

Many of you may be aware of the ongo­ing legal bat­tle between AFACT [Aus­tralias ver­sion of the RIAA] and IINET. You can catch up with the par­tic­u­lars at itnews.com.au

Inves­ti­ga­tors claim to have recorded almost 100,000 instances of iiNet users mak­ing avail­able online unau­tho­rised copies of films and TV pro­grams from the film studio’s cat­a­logues, lawyers for the film indus­try said in court today…

“By mak­ing those films avail­able in those…instances, iiNet cus­tomers invited any and every user of the freely avail­able Bit­Tor­rent soft­ware pro­gram to down­load any and every part of those infring­ing copies,” the industry’s lawyers said in open­ing remarks.

AFACT accuses iiNet’s cus­tomers of using bit­tor­rent traf­fic to “steal” copy­righted con­tent, and pro­poses that iiNet should fil­ter this traf­fic and dis­con­nect users who file-share. This case is the first of its kind in Aus­tralia, and will set the legal prece­dent for cases in the future. If iiNet lose this one, then most Aus­tralian Bit­tor­rent users will have to find a dif­fer­ent solution.

Is it morally accept­able to fil­ter inter­net traf­fic? As an inter­net user, you are not pay­ing for access to “the inter­net”, you are pay­ing for access to a global net­work of pro­to­cols and equip­ment. This equip­ment joins together to cre­ate the inter­net. When cer­tain providers start block­ing cer­tain pieces of soft­ware and pro­to­cols, the integrity of the inter­net is chal­lenged. Amer­i­cans in par­tic­u­lar have prob­lems with the con­cept of net­work fil­ter­ing, because it imposes on their insti­tu­tional right to free-speech. (After all, isnt inter­net traf­fic only a means of trans­mit­ting infor­ma­tion, regard­less of protocol?)

NET NEUTRALITY [wikipedia] A neu­tral broad­band net­work is one that is free of restric­tions on con­tent, sites, or plat­forms, on the kinds of equip­ment that may be attached, and on the modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion allowed, as well as one where com­mu­ni­ca­tion is not unrea­son­ably degraded by other com­mu­ni­ca­tion streams.

Block­ing bit­torent is only a band-aid fix for a much larger prob­lem (the equiv­e­lant of a gov­ern­ment block­ing white vans from dri­ving on the roads, “because most drugs are trans­ported in white vans, and stop­ping white vans from dri­ving on our roads will elim­i­nate the drug problem”).

No mat­ter what hap­pens, piracy will only con­tinue to grow in pop­u­lar­ity, there will always be new ways to share con­tent. Most inter­net users will remem­ber nap­ster [wikipedia], and what hap­pened to ille­gal file shar­ing when it was shut down? Noth­ing. Absolutely noth­ing. File shar­ing is more pop­u­lar today that it has ever been, which leads us to ask, will shut­ting down bit­tor­rent traf­fic stop file sharing?

I would have to say: no. There are always new tech­nolo­gies, new workarounds and legal loop-holes. Down­load­ers will always find a way to download. And yet we are posed with the ques­tion: Why will file shar­ing con­tinue to grow regard­less of bittorrent’s future?

Most peo­ple I know do not shoplift, do not steal cars and most cer­tainly do not snatch-bags. Yet, many of my friends share files. The law is sup­posed to be a moral reflec­tion of soci­ety, laws regard­ing file shar­ing are sup­posed to rep­re­sent the morals of its end-users. But here we are, down­load­ing entire Michael Jack­son discogra­phies and new release block­busters with a sin­gle click. Many bit­tor­nent users would tell you that Pay­ing $44 for a Blu­Ray movie is ridicu­lous, and that the money-hungry cor­po­ra­tions and stars should sell their works cheaper (I bet peo­ple wouldn’t bother down­load­ing new-release movies if they were sold for $9.99 at the local Coles)

So on one hand we have money-hungry multi-billion dol­lar com­pa­nies “defend­ing their rights”, and on the other side the end users are defend­ing their right to freedom-of-speech and network-neutrality. Down­load­ers are going to con­tinue down­load­ing music, movies and TV shows, because on a moral level they dia­gree with the law and do not believe it to be fair.

Will the legal sys­tem sell-out to cor­po­ra­tions? After all, the legal sys­tem is sup­posed to serve the peo­ple, not the cor­po­ra­tions. The Aus­tralian legal sys­tem ESPECIALLY does not serve hol­ly­wood or the RIAA.

Also wor­thy of  watch­ing: The IT crowd: File sharing

This is all my per­sonal opi­o­nion, I do not con­done file shar­ing in any way.

I do con­done ques­tion­ing the status-quo.

Tagged as content, Culture, file sharing, internet, law + Categorized as Technology, Internet, Culture, Music, Culture, News, Culture, Revolutionary, Technology