[LINK] Five large Australian ISPs volunteer to help police piracy

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Fernando Cassia
> Sent: Monday, 28 November 2011 5:20 PM
> To: Link
> Subject: [LINK] Five large Australian ISPs volunteer to help 
> police piracy
> 
> 
>
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/telcos-volunteer-to-hel
p-police-piracy-20111127-1o1hc.html
>
> "Australian internet users face an increased risk of prosecution if
they pirate online, with five large ISPs proposing to 
> act on suspected infringement notices provided to them from rights
holders by passing on the notices to users and, in the 
> most extreme circumstances, disclosing the details of alleged pirates"

Quote/
"The Australian ISPs that have agreed to help in policing infringements
are Telstra BigPond, Optus, iiNet, iPrimus and Internode.
/Quote

Interesting, what ever could convince those five giants that it was in
their interests to play P2P sheriff.

Oh wait, there's a clue:

Quote/
"Foxtel was unimpressed, damning the proposal as "self serving,
defective and not in the spirit of our agreed approach".
/Quote

In other words, the five will now get access to Video on Demand content
on favourable terms encouraging them to force their users to pay for
content...

Obviously a win win, (except for Foxtel of course).

/Cynical mode off

About time. The industry would be in one hell of a better place had they
done this when DSL first went mainstream. And not from any pretended
loss from the P2P marketing activity that assists in consumer branding
and peer group familiarisation of deep catalogue (old stuff) content.

The industry would have made a huge bundle from the VOD business that
would have blossomed all over Australia just like it has in Spain and
subsequently the rest of Europe. (Unsurprisingly as soon as economical
VOD was available in the EU, torrenting dramatically decreased.)

Here in Aus, I thought that for the record, we should calculate an
approximate opportunity cost of this delayed market entry. 11 years of
one video per month (@$3.50 per) & an estimated 1.8 million viewers
(Based on early adopter numbers, DSL and cable connections and deducting
Foxtel subscribers); equals only [an extremely conservative] $
831,600,000.00 that the industry missed out on because of restrictive
distribution agreements.

And industry associations will of course omit to report that figure to
their dues paying members... After all, they're never wrong; that's why
they have jobs representing the industries interests. (Ok, I might have
misrepresented the turning off of the cynical mode, just a tad.)


TomK