ACTA: ISPs to be liable for piracy
Summary: If Australia signs the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), internet service providers (ISPs) may be obliged to hand over the identity of its users to those defending copyright.
If Australia signs the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), internet service providers (ISPs) may be obliged to hand over the identity of its users to those defending copyright.
The European Commission of Trade has released a draft of the agreement, which aims to establish international standards on how to enforce intellectual property rights, and has involved countries around the world including Australia.
Signatories to the ACTA will be required to ensure that copyright holders can sue "intermediaries" whose services are used to infringe intellectual property.
"The parties [may] shall also ensure that right holders are in a position to apply for an injunction against [infringing] intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe an intellectual property right," the draft states.
The agreement deals with difficulties that copyright holders have in targeting actual infringers online. It details that ISPs would not be required to be monitored if they agree upfront to hand over the identities of their customers should they come under investigation.
In civil proceedings, like that faced by iiNet in Australia, the agreement would require that authorities have the right to order the infringer to pay damages "adequate to compensate for the injury the right holder has suffered as a result of the infringement".
The draft also outlines how infringements would be valued.
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Talkback
Would this mean Telstra could be held accountable for the use of it's "Wires and cable"?
if only they understood that increased sharing of media content = larger sales. People who download will buy the content if it is good, like a try before you buy, and how can movie companies say that if they stop this piracy, it will increase their profits by the amount that is downloaded. First off pirates aren't going to stop downloading and buy everything, no one has the money, to pay outrageous prices for movies. Secondly the movie industry is in the stone age, they need to make media available on the internet, people don't have time to go and buy or hire movies. thirdly, Most people download TV, because Australia is about one season behind the USA, and adverts take up 33% of the show. If they want to reduce piracy, they must start with trackers and websites, that are made publicly available.
But it will be proven that this step will create a large deficit for the industry.
With research having shown that most people that do download music and or movies etc, will then turn around and buy the original product, this would indicate that they want to know that the product is worth buying before actually spending their money, and with the amount of garbage out there, who can blame them.
Copyright owners need to stop panicking and drag them self in to to new millennia, instead of making under the table payments to politicians and law makers, to have new laws introduced (nothing anybody does will stop these new laws).
Why not wake and smell the possibility of a new way of making money.
I hope that a lot of people follow suit, I hope that this comes back to bite the record/media companies.
If the studios had half a brain they would purchase their own ultra high speed servers and seed Bittorrent with standard resolution / stereo only , advertising supported versions of their shows with pointers on where to get the full highdef 5.1 channel sound versions.
They like things just the way they used to be, as set up by them, and they seem to think they can continue to fund legal and political muscle to keep it 1960 forever.