Australia on Track to Pass Sweeping Anti-Piracy Legislation

AUSTRALIA—In what TorrentFreak is calling "a whirlwind of activity," new legislation titled The Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill is making its way somewhat surreptitiously through the Australian parliament and is expected to be passed this week, despite the fact that the text of the bill has yet to be made public. What is known is that the new law will in some form expedite the blocking of websites found to promote piracy at the ISP level, though the exact definition of what constitutes a pirate site is also unclear at this point. Another element of the bill reflecting the government's revived focus on digital piracy—a result, says  Andy at TF, of the nation's "reputation for being a country of file-sharing pirates"—involves creating a legal mechanism by which copyright holders will be given "access, indirectly if necessary, to communicate with errant Internet users found to be downloading and sharing copyrighted material without permission." But it is the blocking of foreign sites that will set Australia on a new path. "Despite many countries now making extensive use of the process," observes Andy, "site blocking itself is highly controversial. In the UK, for example, rights-holders initially have to go court but are then free to add news sites to existing injunctions, even ones that don’t directly infringe any copyrights." Down Under, the new measures introducing foreign site blocking (domestic site blocking is already allowed) will be "an interesting thing to behold," augers Andy, who adds of the vast continent's unique place in the digital world, "After years of being treated as second-class content consumers who have to wait longer and pay more for their content, Aussies have become extremely adept at using VPN and proxy services to access legal services such as Netflix. Those same tools can be used to easily evade site bans and recent concerns over the introduction of a strikes mechanism has only boosted interest in them."