Darkness at Noon

… and now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for:

The Australian film and television industry has launched a major legal action against one of Australia’s largest internet service providers for allegedly allowing its users to download pirated movies and TV shows.

And the ISP they are saying is authorising copyright infringement is iiNet (who also happen to be my ISP).

The AFACT Press release can be read here. Who are AFACT? Good question, one I asked myself. According to their website:

AFACT members include: Village Roadshow Limited; Motion Picture Association: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Australia; Paramount Pictures Australia; Sony Pictures Releasing International Corporation; Twentieth Century Fox International; Universal International Films, Inc.; and Warner Bros. Pictures International, a division of Warner Bros. Pictures Inc.

So it’s ‘the cartel’ – who else.

I have no idea if this case has any legal merit and I sure hope it doesn’t, it’s just an attempt to scare ISPs into a three-strikes policy. Kim Weatherall has a very detailed post about it here which is worth a read – she’s the one I turn to for legal advice on these thing.

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation, also has plenty of material on it.

In a net-censorship aside, Kim Weatherall points to a few places for information I hadn’t come across before and thought would be worth mentioning here. Somebody Think of the Children, and of course, Dale Clapperton’s Defending Scoundrels site and Irene Graham’s Libertus site.

I remember reading Monbiot’s Heat and being struck by the point he makes about housing stock – particularly for rental properties.

To deal with the challenges of climate change, massive changes need to be made to housing stock. Building standards need to be dramatically altered to to ensure greater energy efficiency. In the mean time, owner-occupiers have incentive to improve their house’s energy efficiency because of the reduction in energy bills they would receive. However, there is no incentive to improve the energy efficiency of a house that you are renting out.

So once again, the poor are the ones that produce the least greenhouse gas emissions but suffer the most from them with higher energy bills leading to what is called “energy poverty” – when you have to choose whether to eat, or turn the heater on.

However, there is hope yet. One group is trying to do something about his: Just Change

Just Change makes it easy to be energy efficient by:

• Reducing the hassle by bringing together a range of products and programs and providing a streamlined, standardised consent process to make it as easy as possible for landlords, real estate agents and tenants to introduce energy efficiencies.
• Helping with upfront costs by combining available grants and sourcing additional funding so that upfront costs are low or non-existent.

I like it!

How do you make something interesting? Add sex.

Now, I want to make it clear that I have major issues with pornography and the porn industry. I don’t think it is particularly healthy for anyone (male and female) and I can’t abide by the codification of women’s bodies.

But I am intrigued by this development in the internet filter debate:

Eros, Australia’s national adult industry association, is launching the Australian Sex Party today and, among other aims, has set its sights on ending the Federal Government’s plans for a national internet filter.

What can I say, I think the Australian Sex Party (it sounds a little like a nation wide orgy, but maybe that’s the point) will be above the ALP on my ballot at the next election.

Here’s an organisation that seems to be doing some pretty exciting stuff: Tactical Technology Collective.

Tactical Tech is an international NGO helping human rights advocates use information, communications and digital technologies to maximise the impact of their advocacy work. We provide advocates with guides, tools, training and consultancy to help them develop the skills and tactics they need to increase the impact of their campaigning.

Opposition to Conroy’s internet filter is growing but he seems to be pushing through with it after enlisting Enex TestLab.

As we all know by now, all tests to date have showing ISP level internet filtering to be completely useless. The tests have been done, they were a disaster. As long as you have to check every bit of data going from the Internet to your computer it will necessarily slow thing down. Australia already has very poor broadband services so why would you slow it down any further.

Anyway, in a move I’m not sure how I feel about, it would appear that “the Cartel” agrees with me:

A LOBBY group set up by internet auction house eBay and other online merchants in the US and Europe plans to open a chapter in Australia as the Federal Government is poised to reveal details of its contentious cyber safety plan.
…
This filtering plan has been widely criticised and now international lobby group Netchoice wants to weigh into the debate.

Netchoice is backed by members including eBay, publisher AOL Time Warner, some heavyweight trade associations in the US and software house Oracle.

I can’t help but feel a little relieved by this. I assume that by “weigh into the debate” they mean throw a lot of money around. That’s something most opponents to the filter can’t do. I’m not sure what AOL Time Warner’s position on net neutrality is. According to Wikipedia: “In April 2006, Time Warner’s AOL blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com, an advocacy campaign opposing the company’s pay-to-send e-mail scheme. An AOL spokesman called the issue an unintentional glitch.”

According to Save the Internet:

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all (my emphasis).

For now though, let’s hope that Netchoice (Orwell would love that one) weighing in will put an end to internet filtering.

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation have set up a “No Clean Feed” website at: www.nocleanfeed.com.

The EFF do some great work and this site is full of all the info you need.