The rich TV and music execs just want to get richer...

SMH Online, 20 April 2009

Wearing bandanas and waving Jolly Roger flags, hundreds of supporters of file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay demonstrated on Saturday against a Swedish court's conviction of the Internet site's organisers.

The Stockholm district court on Friday sentenced Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom to one year in prison each for helping millions of Pirate Bay users commit copyright violations of movies, music and computer games.

The court also ordered them to pay 30 million kronor ($5 million) in damages to international entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

The entertainment industry applauded the move, calling it a landmark decision protecting the rights of those whose livelihood depend on creative activity.

All four defendants have vowed to appeal the verdict.

The rallies against "judicial murder" occurred in Stockholm, Goteborg, Karlstad and Lund and were organised by The Pirate Party. The political party, which supports free file-sharing for noncommercial use, said its membership rose by more than 20 percent to about 20,000 after the court announced its verdict.

Police spokeswoman Birgitta Nilsen said at least 500 mostly young people were protesting in Stockholm alone, many supporting the Pirate Bay defendants by wearing bandanas and carrying skull and crossbones flags.

The Pirate Party does not have any formal ties to The Pirate Bay, but has expressed its support of the site on several occasions.

Party Chairman and founder Rickard Falkvinge received loud cheers as he addressed the black-clad crowd at the Medborgarplatsen square in downtown Stockholm, demanding that the defendants to be freed from the charges.

"The establishment and the politicians have declared war against our whole generation," he said, calling on "file-sharing for the people".

The Pirate Bay doesn't host copyright-protected material, but directs users to content through so-called torrent files. It has an estimated 22 million users worldwide.

Asher Moses
SMH Online, 1 April 2009

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has begun distancing himself from his controversial internet censorship policy in what one internet industry engineer has dubbed "the great walkback of 2009".

Senator Conroy has long said his policy would introduce compulsory ISP-level filters of the Australian Communications and Media Authority's blacklist of prohibited websites. But last night, he said the mandatory filters would be restricted to content that has been "refused classification" (RC).

When the ACMA blacklist was leaked last month, it caused great controversy, partly because it included a slew of R18+ and X18+ sites, including regular gay and straight pornography and other legal content.

But on SBS' Insight program last night, Senator Conroy said "it's mandatory refused classification, and then parents - if the trial says that it is possible to go down this path ... have the option to block other material".

This about-turn has done little to assuage the concerns of online rights groups, the Federal Opposition and the internet industry, as the RC category includes not just child pornography but anti-abortion sites, fetish sites and sites containing pro-euthanasia material such as The Peaceful Pill Handbook by Dr Philip Nitschke.

Sites added to the blacklist in error were also classified as RC, such as one containing PG-rated photographs by Bill Henson.

And the websites of several Australian businesses - such as those of a Queensland dentist - were classified RC and blacklisted after they were hacked by, as Senator Conroy described, "the Russian mob". They were on the blacklist even though they changed hosting providers and cleaned up their sites several years ago.

"The guidelines are so broad that RC can't help but hoover up political speech even if only as collateral damage," said Internode network engineer Mark Newton, describing Senator Conroy's comments last night as "the great walkback of 2009".

Senator Conroy conceded many of the decisions regarding what sites appeared on the blacklist were made by "faceless bureaucrats". He said he was working to build in "further safeguards", but would not abolish the policy because some sites were found to be put on the blacklist in error.

"I don't think Senator Conroy really even knows what his own policy in relation to filtering is. It seems to change on an almost daily basis; it is vague and contradictory and there is little public confidence in his ability to implement it," said Opposition communications spokesman Nick Minchin.

Asher Moses, SMH Online 
March 26, 2009

A link containing Bill Henson's artistic photographs of young boys has been added to the communications regulator's blacklist, again calling into question claims by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy that his internet filtering plan would block only the worst of the worst sites.

The images appear on a "male beauty" blog that contains several nude male images. However, the only link to the site found on the blacklist is one containing just five Bill Henson photographs. The boys are clothed in all of the images except for one, which shows a naked boy, but no genitalia are pictured.

The link was added to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) blacklist despite the Classification Board last year clearing Henson's work for general release.

Sites featured on the list were only revealed this month after a leaked version was published on the Wikileaks website.

While the list of "prohibited" material does not have a significant impact on most internet users today, links contained on it will be blocked for everyone if Conroy proceeds with his mandatory internet filtering plan.

Henson's spokeswoman Sue Cato declined to comment, as did ACMA and Conroy.

Colin Jacobs, spokesman for online users lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said: "With an abortion site, the Peaceful Pill Handbook and Bill Henson photos all now revealed to be on the blacklist, claims that the list only includes the 'worst of the worst' of the web are sounding like those over-emphatic defences of Guantanamo Bay."

Jacobs said EFA was "pretty unenthusiastic" about a censorship system "where we have no choice but to take such assertions at face value".

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam said: "It's a classic example of that scope creep. They say it's about the worst of the worst but before you know it it's expanding to cover other kinds of material."

The Classification Board said it had received 10 applications to classify works by Henson. It found the images of children were not sexualised, "mild in viewing impact and justified by context". This is despite some of the images depicting a naked female with "breast nudity".

Henson's images sparked a political storm last year following an uproar on talkback radio, which led to police seizing 32 of Henson's photographs from Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 gallery.

At the time, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, declared the pictures "absolutely revolting". But the case against Henson eventually collapsed, with the Director of Public Prosecutions advising NSW Police that any prosecution of Henson would be unlikely to succeed.

Conroy initially called into question the veracity of the leaked blacklist but yesterday said the latest leaked version, dated March 18, "seemed to be close" to ACMA's current blacklist.

"It is completely untrue that the leaked blacklist contains political content. This is a list which contains sites that promote incest, rape, child pornography and child abuse," he said.

However, alongside child porn, bestiality, rape and extreme violence sites, the leaked list also includes a slew of online poker and gambling sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even the sites of a Queensland dentist, a school canteen consultancy and an animal carer.

"If in the future the Prime Minister finds a controversial artwork 'revolting' or an online game too violent, do you trust him to resist pushing the 'ban it' button? He could then go on talk radio and say something was being done," Jacobs said.

The Opposition communications spokesman, Nick Minchin, said he had not seen the blacklisted link with the Henson images but the revelations raised "further questions about how Senator Conroy will compile any blacklist and how this will be vulnerable to 'creeping' based on the political will of the day".

Yesterday, Conroy said public concern about the possibility of the blacklist "creeping" to include legal content was justified, but stopped short of guaranteeing the Government would be able to prevent it.

The Government plans to expand the blacklist to up to 10,000 sites and has said it plans to incorporate sites found on international blacklists.

Australia's third largest internet provider, iiNet, has withdrawn from the Government's internet censorship trials, saying it could not "reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility".

The move comes after the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks last week published a leaked copy of the secret Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) blacklist of prohibited websites, which forms the backbone of the Government's censorship policy.

Far from containing just "illegal material" such as child pornography, the list of prohibited websites includes a wealth of legal material such as regular gay and straight porn sites, YouTube links, online poker sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites and even the sites of a Queensland dentist, a school canteen consultancy and an animal carer.

The Government's mandatory internet censorship plan, which is already being trialled by a number of small ISPs, will block sites contained on the ACMA blacklist for all Australians.

"We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship," iiNet managing director Michael Malone said.

"It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as 'unwanted material' without an explanation of what that includes."

Betty Peters, 78, a retired nurse educator from Melbourne whose pro-euthanasia YouTube videos were included on the blacklist, said she was "outraged" at the Government's big brother attitude to Australian senior citizens.

"We do not need a 40-year-old senator like [Communications Minister] Stephen Conroy deciding for us what is good and bad. I am appalled that our free country has come to this," said Peters, who does volunteer work for euthanasia organisation Exit International.

Senator Conroy and ACMA initially tried to discredit Wikileaks by saying the leaked blacklist was about double the size of ACMA's list. However, they admitted that both lists shared "some common URLs".

 

IT'S enough to turn you off your lunch.

Web censorship plan heads towards a dead end

The Government's plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled, following an independent senator's decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any legislation required to get the scheme started.

The Opposition's communications spokesman Nick Minchin has this week obtained independent legal advice saying that if the Government is to pursue a mandatory filtering regime "legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required".

Senator Nick Xenophon previously indicated he may support a filter that blocks online gambling websites but in a phone interview today he withdrew all support, saying "the more evidence that's come out, the more questions there are on this".

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has consistently ignored advice from a host of technical experts saying the filters would slow the internet, block legitimate sites, be easily bypassed and fall short of capturing all of the nasty content available online.

Despite this, he is pushing ahead with trials of the scheme using six ISPs - Primus, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1.

But even the trials have been heavily discredited, with experts saying the lack of involvement from the three largest ISPs, Telstra, Optus and iiNet, means the trials will not provide much useful data on the effects of internet filtering in the real-world.

Senator Conroy originally pitched the filters as a way to block child porn but - as ISPs, technical experts and many web users feared - the targets have been broadened significantly since then.

ACMA's secret blacklist, which will form the basis of the mandatory censorship regime, contains 1370 sites, only 674 of which relate to depictions of children under 18. A significant portion - 506 sites - would be classified R18+ and X18+, which is legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal.

This week Senator Conroy said there was "a very strong case for blocking" other legal content that has been "refused classification". According to the classification code, this includes sites depicting drug use, crime, sex, cruelty, violence or "revolting and abhorrent phenomena" that "offend against the standards of morality".

And last month, ACMA added an anti-abortion website to its blacklist because it showed photographs of what appears to be aborted foetuses. The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond.

The chief songwriter and producer of Australian dance music group Sneaky Sound System says digital music piracy isn't a major problem for popular artists because the vast majority of earnings come from playing live shows.

Angus McDonald made the comments at a launch event for Nokia's Comes With Music bundles. From next month the package will give people unlimited free music downloads from the Nokia Music Store for 12 or 18 months when they buy a Nokia phone.

"This model certainly has the potential to be a significant new revenue stream for our members," said Richard Mallet, director of recorded music services at APRA/AMCOS, which collects licence fees and royalties on behalf of the music industry.

The record labels and songwriters are the main losers from piracy and plummeting CD sales but the artists who perform the songs are not as badly affected as the lion's share of their revenue comes from live shows and merchandise sales.

In fact, some groups have said piracy could be beneficial as it allowed more people to experience their music and hence created a larger fan base.

"From an artist's perspective ... the labels probably don't want to hear this, but our main income stream, and certainly most of our pleasure, comes from playing to lots and lots of people," McDonald said.

Piracy was an issue for Sneaky Sound System but they still sold 200,000 physical copies of their self-titled debut album. McDonald said people had a perception that music was "either very cheap or free" but initiatives such as Comes With Music should entice more people into legal channels, "fingers crossed".

Comes With Music bundles will be in stores from March 20. Initially only one Nokia phone model will be available - the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, which is the handset maker's first touch-screen device.

Those looking for a one-year subscription to the music store will pay $979 for the phone, while 18 months can be had for $1109. More than 4 million songs are available and Nokia said this would increase to 10 million in the coming months.

The subscription can be renewed only by buying a new Nokia phone that supports Comes With Music. New models will be launched this year including the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic, which debuts in April and is pitched at budget-conscious consumers.

Users can download as many songs as they like and tracks do not disappear once the subscription lapses. However, all tracks are protected by Windows Media piracy locks so they can only be played on the Nokia phone and one dedicated PC.

Songs can be downloaded directly to the phone or via a PC. Most people should use the latter method as downloading directly to the phone incurs data costs from the mobile carrier.

Gavin Parry, head of sales for Sony Music Australia, said digital music sales only represented 20 per cent of the market and most of those sales were generated by one dominant player, Apple's iTunes.

With physical CD sales dropping at a faster rate than the growth in digital sales, Parry said he was hopeful the new Comes With Music all-you-can-eat model would arrest the shift towards illegal download sites.

"At the end of the day, we're fighting free," he said.

PRIVATE SYDNEY by Andrew Hornery

SMH Online, 3 February 2009

ON THE same day the world learned that the US swimming star Michael Phelps had jeopardised his multimillion-dollar sponsorship earnings after being photographed sucking on a bong, Australia's Matthew Mitcham, pictured, revealed he was yet to land a big sponsor - six months after winning Beijing gold.

Yesterday it was Kerri-Anne Kennerley who led the charge for Mitcham during an interview on her morning show. "It is tough," Mitcham told her. "A lot of people are having a lot of trouble, myself included . . . like I haven't signed anything yet but we are working on things and there are some things in the works and there are some things that are close."

K. A. K. responded: "I am a little shocked that you have not been snapped up as quickly as I believe you should have been because we should celebrate who and what you are - No. 1, the best, perfect."

Related: Greedy entertainment fatcats pick on iinet

One of the largest ISPs signed up to participate in Labor's ambitious internet censorship trials has said its application has been met with "deafening silence" from the Government, raising questions over the workability of the proposed scheme and the effectiveness of the trials.

The Government originally planned to trial the mandatory internet filters before Christmas but the timetable has been pushed back considerably and the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has still not released details of which ISPs have signed up to take part in the trials or when they will begin.

Mark White, COO of iiNet, said the ISP put in its submission to be part of the trial on December 6 and was told that the Government would come back with more details by the middle of January, but all it had heard was "deafening silence".

"I can't for a moment speculate what's going on but it certainly doesn't seem to be running as a project on time and they're certainly not communicating with the people that they need to - that is, the ISPs that have offered to test this thing," said White.

Senator Conroy - despite his promises before Labor was elected that people would be able to opt out of any internet filters - has said the first tier of the Government's censorship policy will be compulsory for all. This would block all "illegal" and "inappropriate" material, as determined in part by a secret blacklist administered by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

A second tier would filter out content deemed harmful for children, such as pornography, but this would be optional for internet users.

Australia's largest ISP, Telstra, and Internode have said they will not take part in the trials. The second-largest ISP, Optus, will run a scaled-back trial of just the first tier, while iiNet, the third-biggest provider, has also said it will only trial the first tier, simply to show the Government that its scheme will not work.

The Government said this week it had received 16 applications from ISPs looking to take part in the trials and more details would be available within days but the lack of participation from the major ISPs indicates that the trial participants will be small players with few users.

This may mean the trials will not provide much useful data as to the effects of internet filtering in the real-world.

Cooperation from the large ISPs has been so poor that makers of internet filtering hardware - mindful of the revenue they could generate if the internet censorship plan goes ahead - are petitioning small ISPs, offering to provide them with all the equipment they need to take part in the trials.