The darkest week in Australian internet

THREATENING letters, websites shut down and your private details exposed. Australia’s piracy crackdown has begun. Are you in trouble?

IT’S been the darkest week for Australian internet users in history, with new piracy bills, website-blocking laws passing and a precedent setting court case all occurring.

It all started when Mashable obtained a draft copy of the letter that people who illegally downloaded the movie Dallas Buyers Club will soon receive in the mail.

Key points in the letter read: “There are substantial costs of producing films which are incurred from the outset of production and are not recuperated until such time as a film is exploited and made available to the public. DBC and Voltage consider the level of piracy of the film to be egregious and, taking into account the profound impact of piracy on them, intend to take legal proceedings against any person who has engaged in piracy of the film. We are writing to you because an IP address linked to your internet account with [insert] was used to illegally upload the film.”

Downloaders of Dallas Buyers Club, beware.

What happens if I receive the letter?

Recipients of the letter then are given two options: either pay up or you’ll be taken to court. If they don’t respond within 28 days to the letter, Dallas Buyers Club and its copyright holder Voltage will send the lawyers after them.

The music industry tried this type of thing years ago and it was a complete PR disaster.

In the USA, movie studios have been doing something called speculative invoicing. This involves sending a legal threat to someone saying that unless they pay a sum of money they will take them to court, which is what DBC/Voltage is doing. But often that sum of money is a few thousand dollars, when the actual loss to the rights holders would be no more than a few hundred at most.

People often choose to settle in fear, whether the sum is fair or not.

What’s the government now doing about piracy?

On Monday, things got even worse, with a new site-blocking law passing Parliament that has been heavily slammed by critics.

Both the government and the opposition in the Senate supported the new law, which would effectively introduce an “internet filter” across the country.

The new bill would allow copyright holders such as record labels, film studios and video game publishers to apply to the Federal Court for all Australian internet providers to block overseas websites that facilitate piracy.

The rights holders must show proof that the sites’ sole purpose is to host and supply copyrighted material illegally before they are blocked. This means that sites like The Pirate Bay and illegal sports streaming site SportStream.tv will likely be some of the first to go.

Not happy. Greens WA Senator Scott Ludlam.

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam was furious that the law passed, claiming that rights holders had managed to control the “dangerous” Bill. He also expressed fear that the new law could make it standard for rights holders to make sites simply disappear, and that things like virtual private networks (VPNs), which are used to circumvent geo-blocked websites, could also be blocked.

“Does anyone seriously believe that this scheme won’t be expanded in the future to cover more categories of content? Of course it will. It has scope creep absolutely built into it. It is lazy, and it is dangerous,” he said.

So will it actually work?

The same type of torrent blocking system has been in the UK since 2011 with little success. Some of the most popular torrenting sites in the world, including The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents, have all been blocked, but people keep finding ways to download content.

Typically, within hours of a site being put on the block list by an internet provider, hundreds of mirror sites that offer the same content pop up for users to access. Then, by the time those sites are blocked or taken down, there are more to replace them. It’s a never-ending circle.

UK residents have also worked around blocks by using proxy websites, which stop the internet service providers (ISPs) from thinking they are actually visiting those websites.

As a result, proxy sites have also been blocked.

However, The Pirate Bay, the world’s biggest torrenting site, now uses a new service to host the site, which stops most ISPs from being able to block it. The new service effectively hides the information about The Pirate Bay from internet providers, making it harder for them to block access to their main site.

James Brandes from ORGZine, a UK digital rights magazine, says: “Not only is the block policy fundamentally failing, but it raises important censorship.”

What’s next?

There are two things that are likely to happen next, with one better than the other. The first, which Senator Ludlam voiced his fears about in parliament, is the blocking of VPNs. They are used as an extra layer of internet security to hide your identity on the internet and, for the most part, are used legally and to help with internet privacy.

However, some people take advantage of them to anonymise themselves when downloading illegally so it is harder to get caught. Similarly, they can be used to access geo-blocked websites like Hulu and the US version of Netflix. For those reasons, rights owners are keen to see them blocked also. There are those lobbying against them, such as Senator Ludlam, but, at this stage, it seems more likely both the government and the opposition will support action.

The other thing likely to change is the introduction of a three-strikes system. Customers suspected of illegally downloading content could be hit with a series of escalating infringement notices from ISPs. After the first breach, a customer would be emailed a standardised “Education” notice and if they continued to breach copyright laws they would be sent a “Warning” notice followed by a “Final” notice.

After the final notice, ISPs may then be forced to hand over customers details to rights holders to pursue legal action.