The dance around piracy in Australia twirls ever onwards, with iiNet and Village Roadshow specifically facing off right now. They’re not always arguing about what you think they might be, however.
There’s been a recent spate of accusation and counter-accusation flying around at the moment as it relates to piracy/copyright infringement/three strikes law and the rest.
I’ve been guilty of this myself, writing about the future prospects recently and then spending some time talking at length with my Vertical Hold sparring partner Adam Turner about this very issue.
Village Roadshow co-CEO Graham Burke isn’t a man to mince words about this issue, although as I pointed out in Vertical Hold, he’s on one particular vested interest side of this particular issue. He’s taken particular issue with iiNet, long the whipping boy of the piracy debate, as though there weren’t other ISPs out there with market share for some inexplicable reason, telling CNET’s Claire Reilly that iiNet’s recent blog post around site blocking and piracy was full of “lies”.
Mind you, Graham’s also given to odd analogies, stating in the same interview that
“iiNet are selling a car which happens to kill people on the roads, so they should be paying towards that. It’s the car that’s faulty. In this instance it’s the fault of the car, not the driver.”
Actually, no, Graham, if that analogy worked, my internet connection would be pirating movies all on its own. I don’t think that it’s quite that self-aware just yet.
Equally, he’s bafflingly told ZDNet’s Josh Taylor (while dropping further hints that Netflix is coming to Australia) that the reason The Lego Movie was delayed in Australia was a “one-off”, stating that “We made the decision to hold it off a couple of months until the school holiday break so kids could see it in the holidays which is when they want to see it. That was a one off. It’s not an example of how films are delayed in Australia.”
Actually that’s total garbage and I’m sure he knows it.
It’s an entirely regular thing across the entire industry that kid-centric movies are delayed to coincide with the school holiday period. It happens ALL THE TIME.
It’s not a one-off, it’s a calculated business move that’s been happening for decades. I get why they do it, and as I’ve stated endlessly before, I’m still personally in the camp that states that if you create a thing, it’s yours to do with as you wish, irrespective of the ease of duplication. If they want to hold movies to school holidays, they’re within their rights to do so, which means it’s also a bafflingly weird thing for Graham Burke to say, because it comes close to saying that the pirates might have a point. I’m sure that’s not what he’d want to say.
What’s really odd here, though, is that there’s actually more agreement in the main than might appear on the surface. Both sides in this argument are broadly proposing three strikes style laws, for better or worse.
iiNet has long argued around the availability issue, but it’s also part of the Communications Alliance, whose proposed model wants to shift the cost of a notice-based (essentially a three-strikes style) model back towards the copyright holders, on the grounds that even a small reduction in piracy rates should have an uptick in copyright holder profits.
To quote specifically:
“The Australian Content Industry Group (ACIG), which represents a coalition of
Rights Holders, believes that the retail value lost to their industry sector through
online copyright infringement via file-sharing by Australian consumers in 2010
was A$900m and growing rapidly.
The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft commissioned a study,
released in January 2011, which claimed that the direct losses to the movie
industry alone in Australia from copyright infringement in the 12 months leading
to Q3 2010 totalled A$575m.
Several recent research efforts have indicated that approximately 70% of
infringers would change their behaviour and strop infringing copyright if they
received educational or warning notices indicating that their activity is being
detected and may be illegal
Using these data points as a guide, it follows that if a notice scheme in Australia
succeeded in changing the behaviour of even two-thirds of casual infringers,
this should generate an annual economic uplift to Rights Holders at least in the
order of $420m per annum (i.e. $900m x 70% x 2/3). A small fraction of this
economic value would be more than sufficient to fund the initial establishment
and primary operating costs of the scheme.”
The ISPs want the copyright holders to cover costs (at least in part; the same document also suggests further study into costing models) on the grounds that they’ll benefit from a reduction in piracy. The copyright holders want the ISPs to pay, on the grounds that it’s the connection that makes the piracy possible.
So what’s actually happening right now is a war of words with lots of “Pirates!” and “Lies!” screaming masking the commercial issue, which still sits at a very basic “Piracy is bad — but who should pay for cleaning it up?” argument.
Image: BurnAway