The Australian government is fed up and will today propose legislation that will allow them to ban torrent/piracy search results and services as they appear. As it stands there are a few domains that have already been blocked here in Australia but the amount that exist and their ability to quickly switch domains has meant that previous attempts to shut them down have been futile.
The Daily Telegraph are reporting that with the introduction of this legislation by Communications Minister Mitch Fifield, the government will have the ability to stop search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing from promoting these torrent sites. It’s also been made clear that the proposed law will allow for internet service providers like Telstra to filter out, block and limit the actual search results in regards to piracy.
We’re all aware that the internet is a wild and dangerous place, torrenting services and pirates will always exist – but these powers will at least level the playing field in what was previously a gun vs knife fight.
The requests by copyright owners are still required to be run through a court before any services, websites or results are blocked which is a mandatory safety measure.
When discussing this internally, we found the biggest counter-argument to this proposal is that “some content isn’t available globally”, but in the vast majority of cases it actually is – people just aren’t prepared to pay for it. Between the Apple Store, Amazon, Netflix, Stan, Spotify, etc you’re guaranteed to find what you’re looking for. However if you’re stuck, check out websites like Just Watch that will tell you exactly where to stream, download or buy the title you’re looking for.
Ultimately this proposed legislation is a big win for the industry and will hopefully see an end to internet piracy in Australia.
