When the Australian government is determined to side with content providers rather than consumers, it’s a little surprising to hear a government minister admit that file sharing isn’t always a bad thing. But that happened this morning.
Speaking at the GovInnovate conference in Canberra today, Minister for Justice Michael Keenan discussed the challenges of dealing with cybercrime. “Tools that have legitimate uses such as peer-to-peer file sharing and encryption are also used by criminals to conceal their activities,” he said.
It was a passing remark, but even acknowledging the reality that P2P has plenty of other uses besides accessing movies and TV is an unusual shift. We doubt you’ll hear Senator George Brandis singing the praises of BitTorrent any time soon, so we had better take what we can get.