[AusNOG] re Australian senate passes controversial, anti-piracy, website-blocking laws

[Robert Hudson]

On 23 Jun 2015 9:56 pm, "Chad Kelly" <chad at cpkws.com.au> wrote:
>
> On 6/23/2015 8:51 PM, ausnog-request at lists.ausnog.net wrote:
>>
>> However, if *you* are the first test case, how do you plan to show to
the court what
>> you interpreted as reasonable, and how you tried to use reasonable
means? The court
>> order won't tell you what 'reasonable' might mean, or what measures
might be
>> considered unreasonable. The content organisation that asked for the
injunction
>> certainly won't tell you.
>
> Well funnily enough, most web hosting providers hear in Australia
prohibit the hosting of copyrighted material and will remove it from the
servers if they find it. Or unless you can prove that you have a licence
for it.
> They have all this stuff outlined in the Terms of Service agreement when
a user signs up.
> The majority of hosting providers have the ability to Terminate accounts
quite easily, or they can suspend accounts at a minimum.

Not particularly relevant here, as this law allows rights holders to
request access to sites hosted anywhere in the world is blocked - this
isn't limited to blocking content hosted in Australia (take-down orders
already existed for this).

> Also Geo blocking is considered reasonable, yes I know it does not work
that effectively, but as long as it looks like your doing something the
courts don't have an issue. Most judges don't have a clue when it comes to
IT.

Whether geo-blocking is reasonable is a matter of perspective - but is also
irrelevant in this case again. This law is about stopping Australian
Internet users from accessing content hosted anywhere in the world.

> As for the VPN argument, that is outside of the ISP and web hosting
providers control and so it would be up to the VPN provider to give the
courts your details.

It is entirely feasible that a rights holder could convince a judge (who
you already noted may well be clueless when it comes to IT) that the
primary use case for a particular VPN service is copyright infringement,
and to create an order to block access to that VPN service.

> Long story short these laws won't make a difference.

They will make a LOT of difference. These laws are Internet
filtering/censorship in the name of protecting the profits of foreign and
local rights holders (corporations), with no discernible benefit to the
general Australian public (and in fact with demonstrated negative impacts
to the general Internet-using population). What a great reason to create
new Australian laws.

And of course, the federal Labor opposition was once again missing in
action, leaving it to the Greens to be the (unfortunately largely ignored)
voice of reason (until ~5 years ago, I never thought I'd be saying that...).
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