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#Australian senate passes controversial anti-piracy, website-blocking laws

Ben Grubb

Piracy websites will soon be blocked in Australia.

In the eyes of at least one intellectual property academic, the passing of controversial anti-piracy website-blocking legislation in the senate on Monday night represented a very dark day for the internet in Australia .

But for the film and TV industry, which has been battling online piracy at record levels, it was a watershed moment. Finally they could seek a remedy in the courts to block access to sites offering their content for free.

The Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015, introduced into parliament by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull in March to curb online piracy of film and TV shows, passed with the Coalition and Labor's support 37-13.

The senate votes for the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015.

The Australian Greens opposed it, as did Senators David Leyonhjelm, Glenn Lazarus and Ricky Muir.

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The legislation allows rights holders to go to a Federal Court judge to get overseas websites, or online locations , blocked that have the primary purpose of facilitating copyright infringement.

If a rights holder is successful in their blocking request, Australian internet providers, such as Telstra and Optus, will need to comply with a judge's order by disabling access to the infringing location.

Sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickAssTorrents. which allow people to illicitly download movies and TV shows online without paying, are expected to be among the first websites in rights holders' sights.

This is a watershed moment, said Simon Bush, head of the Australian Home Entertainment Distributors Association, who has been fighting the government for website-blocking laws for about five years.

It's a fantastic day and a really positive sign for the creative content industry, who can invest more as a result.

Foxtel chief executive Richard Freudenstein said in a statement that he was pleased the government had taken strong action .

They recognise that, not only is piracy theft and therefore morally wrong, it is harmful to Australia's creative communities and to businesses that employ hundreds of thousands of Australians, he said.

These offshore sites are not operated by noble spirits fighting for the freedom of the internet, they are run by criminals who profit from stealing other people's creative endeavours.

But consumer groups and critics of the bill have argued the regime could go much further than intended, enabling rights holders to block sites that host legitimate files in addition to copyright-infringing content.

Dr Matthew Rimmer, an associate professor at the ANU College of Law and one of the bill's critics, labelled the bill quite radical .

It's a very dark day for the internet in Australia because there's been bipartisan support for this Luddite censorship bill, Dr Rimmer said on Monday night.

He said sites that don't intend to host infringing material could get caught up and blocked, pointing to file-sharing sites like mega.co.nz and dropbox.com .

Dr Rimmer added that there would be little oversight and balance in court cases given internet service providers won't have to pay court costs if they don't join cases to scrutinise them.

A lack of definitions within the bill, as well as several other issues, remained unaddressed, Dr Rimmer said.

What is 'primary purpose'? There's no definition. What is 'facilitation'? Again, there's no definition Dr Rimmer said.

I think the larger question will be what sites will be affected?

Will rights holders be focussed on the sites they want to target or will there be collateral damage?

Referring to collateral damage, Dr Rimmer said thousands of legitimate sites not targeted by the regime could be blocked as internet service providers will likely get to choose how to block websites under the new laws.

Federal government agency ASIC infamously blocked access to about 250,000 innocuous websites when it wanted to block just one fraudulent site. It did this by providing internet providers with the IP address of the server a fraudulent website was hosted on rather than the website's URL address. As the IP address hosted thousands of other sites, they were blocked too, and it only became apparent after months of pressure against ASIC before the reason was revealed.

Dr Rimmer also warned of the bill being misused, saying governments (federal or overseas) could use it to censor information provided to sites like WikiLeaks by whistleblowers, as government information is often protected by copyright.

Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam labelled the bill lazy and dangerous .

There is increasing evidence to suggest that site-blocking is not the most effective means of stopping piracy, Senator Ludlam said.

The only effective way to deal with copyright infringement on the kind of scale that the government is concerned about is to just make it available: conveniently, affordably and in a timely way.

Meanwhile, Senator Leyonhjelm said it was badly drafted law.

The government says it will review the effectiveness of the laws in 18 months, although this didn't make it into the bill as a statutory requirement.