ICYMI: Global Tech Giants Hate Australia’s Piracy Proposals

So this is awkward. Just about every Silicon Valley tech company worth noting, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung and others, have all come together to slam Australia’s anti-piracy proposals. It isn’t pretty.

For those behind the 8-ball, the Australian Government is on the verge of a massive piracy intervention in this country, considering proposals involving site blocking, three-strike schemes and potential bandwidth throttling for convicted offenders.

The rhetoric around the proposal has reached fever pitch, with anti-piracy bulldog Village Roadshow, using its submission to the Government’s consultation process to compare pirates to paedophiles and terrorists. Classy.

The Computer and Communications Association (CCIA) is an industry group consisting of a massive bloc of tech companies and global telcos, including (but not limited to), eBay, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Intuit, Microsoft, Motorola, Pandora, RedHat, Samsung, TiVo and Yahoo. So, you know, pretty much every global tech heavyweight that matters.

The CCIA observes in its paper that the government shouldn’t introduce policies like site-blocking and graduated response schemes, and instead should focus on stuff like working with rights-holders to make content more freely available, and to lower prices. >Google Australia has said similar things out on its own before.

The CCIA goes on to say that, despite the lack of a graduated response scheme, rights holders are already able to take legal action in Australia against film pirates, re-iterating that three-strike schemes have been shown to yield little to no results in stemming piracy.

The industry giant also gave the government a stern warning that such policies on copyright were not being generated out of knee-jerk reactions to overblown problems made up by rights holders.

The submission closes with the CCIA urging the government to “think carefully before pushing further to expand authorisation liability”.

Read the full submission here.


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