TR Forums

Apparently they are at least thinking of trying it:

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story ... 39,00.html

While I generally take a hard-line, don't download what you don't own, stance, I am curious just how targeted such a filter could be. Can it be targeted at copyrighted material (with occasional errors) or will it necessarily make the legitimate uses of P2P so inconvenient as you be impractical?

As for comparisons of Australia to China...the words "somewhat overwrought" come to mind.

Do more of that and there will be no "digital economy" to talk about. This is getting into Net Neutrality and I don't know if saying more will get the thread moved to R&P so I'm just going stop right now.

Flying Fox wrote:

Do more of that and there will be no "digital economy" to talk about. This is getting into Net Neutrality and I don't know if saying more will get the thread moved to R&P so I'm just going stop right now.

Presumably the day is coming when legitimate downloads of copyrighted material will be allowed while the illegitimate ones are blocked. To be fair, what percentage of the P2P/BitTorrent downloads are in the former category? Nations have to have some means of enforcing the copyroght laws against would be thieves, just as they'd have an interest in preventing people from downloading child porn. The question is: can possibly be a well targeted response, or are we still at the level where this is the filtering software equivalent throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

I don't doubt that, some day, we'll have the ability to create a filter sophistcated enough to block the illegal downloads and allow the legal ones, but I doubt that we are close to that day.

pyrodeus wrote:

Flying Fox wrote:

Do more of that and there will be no "digital economy" to talk about. This is getting into Net Neutrality and I don't know if saying more will get the thread moved to R&P so I'm just going stop right now.

Presumably the day is coming when legitimate downloads of copyrighted material will be allowed while the illegitimate ones are blocked. To be fair, what percentage of the P2P/BitTorrent downloads are in the former category? Nations have to have some means of enforcing the copyroght laws against would be thieves, just as they'd have an interest in preventing people from downloading child porn. The question is: can possibly be a well targeted response, or are we still at the level where this is the filtering software equivalent throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

I don't doubt that, some day, we'll have the ability to create a filter sophistcated enough to block the illegal downloads and allow the legal ones, but I doubt that we are close to that day.

It is going to come down to the same arguments. Filtering is not going to be super accurate any time soon, blah blah. The problem, again, is the notion that they assume people are guilty to begin with. To me that's just fundamentally wrong, let's leave it at that or I'll have to sign up for the flame-retardant suit which I don't want.

Australia, to me, has always been "behind" in terms of free (in terms of going to various sites, not cost) and affordable internet access compared to Europe and US/Canada. My point is that the further they think about these tricks to either enforce copyright laws or even just a simple matter of limiting bandwidth so ISPs can continue oversubscribing without large capital investments, there is not going to be much of a "digital economy" as they claim to so desperately want.

"Boggling" comes to mind. They basically want to set up a Great Firewall of Australia and pretend it's something else, because it would only be used for Good Purposes. Now as for the technological side, of course it's there, and can be implemented if desired. It won't be great at filtering legal from illegal content, though, unless you define all P2P traffic as suspect, and assume that any legitimate content that gets trapped is a small portion and a small price to pay for eliminating the rest. Which is apparently what they intend to do.

If anyone is interested in following our current broadband situation, this site has everything to do with Internet in Australia, a lot of ISPs have their CEOs and stuff on this place:

http://whirlpool.net.au/

But what do i have to say about the current situation? At least China gets fast speeds! The trial is starting soon. Its blocking out pr0n too, I need to start making a large collection, or its back to *SHUDDER*....MAGAZINES AND DVDS! OH NO!

I wouldn't bother about moving this into R&P, there aren't enough Aussies on here for it to become a big fight and i'm too young to actually give a crap about politics anyway.

AMD Damo wrote:

But what do i have to say about the current situation? At least China gets fast speeds! The trial is starting soon. Its blocking out pr0n too, I need to start making a large collection, or its back to *SHUDDER*....MAGAZINES AND DVDS! OH NO!

Exactly. Like it or not, a lot of pr0n business has gone online. Speed is an important factor. If they want a "digital economy", then what they are doing is not helping. That's why I said "there may be no such economy to talk about if they keep this up".

ludi wrote:

"Boggling" comes to mind. They basically want to set up a Great Firewall of Australia and pretend it's something else, because it would only be used for Good Purposes. Now as for the technological side, of course it's there, and can be implemented if desired. It won't be great at filtering legal from illegal content, though, unless you define all P2P traffic as suspect, and assume that any legitimate content that gets trapped is a small portion and a small price to pay for eliminating the rest. Which is apparently what they intend to do.

Like pyro I am going to be a bit optimistic and speculate that eventually they may find a way to filter out illegal contents based on content analysis, so say your Linux ISO download will not be blocked but Britney's Womanizer will be (whether that song is worth downloading illegally is a completely different topic ). Of course it also brings the question that this is considerable power held in the hands on the content mafiaowners and ISPs, and is abusable by someone else (say the government, just like China).