02.04
Common sense has reigned supreme in the Federal Court earlier today. In what can only be called the right decision, it was found that ISP iinet cannot be held responsible for what its subscribers use their internet connection for. Although the decision has left the AFACT (lobbying body representing a large number of Hollywood movie studios) organisation fuming it can only be said that this decision is the right one and has helped to avert what could have been a very, very black day for the future of the Internet in this country.
The problem with charges that AFACT brought against iinet weren’t just about copyright infringement, problems that proved to be their downfall. The decision rests on the fact that an ISP, in similar manner to a phone company, isn’t responsible for what a user does on their network. That is to say: you wouldn’t sue Telstra for someone organising a crime over the phone.
This decision is a validation of the long held belief that, in the 21st century, an Internet connection is considered a utility rather than a service. My connection to the online world is nothing more than a pipe, my ISP merely a connection point. This means that my ISP is not responsible for what I do on my Internet connection, I am. That’s the way it should be.
What AFACT was asking the court to do, was to have an ISP act as a private police force. AFACT wanted an ISP to act to disconnect a user on based on the mere suggestion that they had illegally downloaded copyright material. There would be no prosecution, no judicial oversight. Just a statement from AFACT that they “believed” copyright infringement had occurred. Clearly this idea just proves that the movie industry consider themselves well and truly above the law. A group like that should never be allowed an inch in which to move in a matter such as this.
But how would AFACT get data on what users are doing on their internet connections? Oh, that’s simple: They’d get the ISPs to spy on their users. The level of deep-packet inspection required to monitor everything that’s going on over a user’s connection is nothing short of a gross invasion of privacy. Without judicial oversight, the prospect of an organisation like that collecting personal information willy-nilly is one that really sends a shiver down my spine. They could, foreseeably, gather anything that I did online and store that information before using it for whatever they saw fit. Not. Good. All of that in name of protecting an industry who seems to think that earing hundreds of billions of dollars year after year is slowing sending them broke.
Here’s what I don’t understand: Why aren’t these movie industry types looking at ways of profiting off what’s clearly a content delivery medium that has a healthy demand? Surely it’d be better for everyone if the studios were looking at ways to deliver movies over the internet to customers legitimately. Surely they can’t be ignoring that area for the sake of saving the dead horse that is the local video shop?
What’s also worrying were comments made by our dear, beloved Minister for Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy Senator Stephen Cuntroy. In March last year (many, many months before this case came to trail) Mr Cuntroy declared of iinet’s defence:
“I thought a defence in terms of ‘we had no idea’ … belongs in a Yes Minister episode.”
Holy fuck. This is man is in charge of developing our $43billion National Broadband Network (which he isn’t, but that’s another rant) and he doesn’t understand how the ISP is nothing more than a node to which people connect. They don’t control people, the Internet certainly doesn’t exist for the sole purposes of pirating movies and the fact that he seems susceptible to believing the utter shit that flows from the mouths of AFACT members should be something that’s very concerning to us, the population. This man is supposed to be putting the best interests of our country forward. He’s supposed to be fixing everything that’s wrong with telecommunications in this country. He’s not supposed to be pandering to industry lobby groups who are clutching desperately to old and broken business models because they’re scared of the future.
So while we may well be celebrating what was a momentous occasion for the campaign to keep the internet free and open, remember, there are still those with power who can clutch it from our grasp.
Hopefully though, now that sensibility has won on this front it can also win on Cuntoy’s other great mistake: the national internet filter. Because that could turn out to be just as bad, if not worse, for us then if the iinet decision had gone the other way.