Steve's Blog

A Neilsen 2010 Internet and Technology report found that 41% of Australian Internet users stream or download videos, and that 21% did so on a regular basis.

Add to this the ambitious Australian Government plans for a National Broadband Network (NBN) of fibre to the door broadband speeds of 50-100Mbps, and the potential for widespread copyright infringing is enormous.

How will the major production Studios be able to protect their content form widespread illegal downloads? Through legal means you might say. But ...

A presentation, given to the Australian Broadcasting Summit held in Sydney late March, included some interesting details of the recent Australian Federal Court copyright infringement case.

Companies representing the Australian and US film industries took a case against iiNet (Now Australia’s 3rd largest ISP). The principal claims were that iiNet user’s infringed copyright; it authorised this copyright infringing to occur by their indifference and inactivity in preventing it; and it was therefore a liable party.

The case was vigorously defended by iiNet and was recognised as a precedent setting case. According to the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFA©T), during the Court hearings iiNet CEO Michael Malone gave evidence that  over 50% of iiNet’s network traffic is Bittorrent file sharing, and he admitted that “a substantial proportion” of that traffic would be likely copyright infringing content.

Ultimately, however, the Federal Court found that iiNet was not liable for the copyright infringements by its customers on its network. According to AFA©T, the findings show the size of disconnect between established copyright law in Australia and the expectations of content creators and providers in the online content space.

So what does this have to do with content and on-line services in New Zealand?

Our own Government driven Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) project is building momentum and while more and more Internet users are using high speed ADSL services, low (Giga Byte) data caps still tend to restrict the number and durations of video downloads and streaming sessions of users.

It is only a matter of time before higher speed services with much higher data caps are launched here and that will better enable users to more easily access copyrighted content. There is little doubt that video traffic will be widespread and common across the UFB Network, but will it be legal or copyright infringing traffic?

If that same content could be easily, cost effectively and legally accessed, the primary driver of illegal behaviour would be removed, and average New Zealanders would not have to break the law to view their preferred content where and when they wanted.

Our major Broadcasters have a big part to play in making that become a reality. Around the world Broadcasters are making content available on multiple platforms and key to their ongoing success are their online strategies.

Read press releases from AFACTS. An appeal has been filed in the Australian iiNet case and it may be heard later this year.