An Australian film industry group is mounting a case against ISP iiNet, alleging that the ISP did not prevent unlawful sharing of (mainly American) copyrighted movies via their network.
AFART makes a few outrageously silly assumptions in their case.
First and silliest of all is that a download equals a lost sale. I’ll download a lot of things that I’d never go to a cinema to watch. That’s not in any way to avoid paying to view the material- it’s to avoid the ‘cinema experience.’
The nearest cinema is a 1 hour, 70km round trip for me. If the film sucks, I can usually get a refund for the price of admission, but I won’t be remunerated for travel time, fuel cost, annoyance and general inconvenience. Cinemas these days often demand to take possession of patrons’ mobile phones while they are viewing a film, allegedly to prevent piracy with their inbuilt cameras- as if a tiny, low resolution screen-to-camera capture of a movie is in any way resaleable or if watching said copy on the phone’s tiny screen itself is even do-able. Moreover, cinemas won’t guarantee that the content of a mobile phone won’t be browsed while the patron is in the theatre. Cinemas further demand to search your pockets and bags to make sure you haven’t brought any contraband soft drinks or snacks with you, assuring that you will pay $5-6 for a soft drink worth 50c at the local grocery or a similar amount for 15c worth of popcorn. I won’t stand for cinemas treating me like a criminal because I have a phone in my pocket or like a rube who will pay ridiculous amounts for ordinary items at a snack bar.
Screw you guys, I’ll stay home, whether I can or can’t download films off the torrents. My Dolby surround sound with subwoofer and 50″ plasma HDTV provide just as good (or better) a viewing experience than I can get at any ordinary cinema. I don’t have to strain to hear the soundtrack between yowls from some patron’s colicky baby or breathe fumes from enthusiastic perfume wearers- or worse. Moreover, imagine the response of the cinema management and other patrons if you ask to have the film paused while you have a bathroom break or take a trip to the snack bar. At home, I can pause at will and if the flick blows (which is all too common), I can turn it off and delete the file from my dedicated home-theatre PC in the loungeroom, without having to demand a refund, suffer any of the other associated delights of the ‘cinema experience’ nor even so much as having to return a DVD to a video rental shop. If the things I do download were made available online by the studios at a nominal cost, I’d happily pay for them, but Hollow-wood has yet to get the idea that in 2009 with modern home-theatre equipment, cinemas are a dead concept… and that the public are sick to death of crap movies.
Second silliest is the idea that Australian TV viewers are happy to cooperatively wait 6-12 months to view an overseas TV series on local broadcasts, and when we do finally get them, series episodes are often shown out of sequence, with large time gaps between the air dates or episodes are skipped entirely. Shows like The Late Show with David Letterman, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show have the shelf-life of lettuce- they’re not worth anything a week (or even a few days) post the original air date. Australian TV viewers have had quite enough of being treated with contempt by cable and free-to-air broadcasters.
Third silliest is the notion that any ISP has the technical ability to look at my encrypted torrent packets to determine what I’m actually downloading, to verify that it’s copyrighted material and further assert that I have shared a complete copy of said matter with anyone.
To use the words of the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart- AFUCT, y’all just keep on fuckin’ that chicken.
-weez
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