Australians who hope to stream Rogue One: A Star Wars Story for free shouldn’t wait until the holidays.
The war on online piracy is waging Down Under. A federal court in Australia on Thursday gave local internet service providers 15 days to block access to dozens of major torrent and proxy sites, in a case brought on by major Hollywood production studios and Australian paid television company Foxtel, reported TorrentFreak. But much like torrent sites themselves, the victory may only be a fleeting one.
The judge’s ruling applied to torrent sites the Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt, and streaming service SolarMovie, as well as numbers of mirror and proxy sites that allow consumers to pirate blocked content.
The ruling may at first seem like an empty victory for rights holders. Torrentz and TorrentHound shut down this fall (TorrentHound has since gone underground), and Solar Movie has been gone since July. The judge did conclude that new torrent sites will likely crop up as a result of the ban.
And it won’t impact Australians who use VPNs, as the Age notes:
“In theory this means anyone attempting to visit the sites from Australia would be redirected, but in practice it is unlikely to significantly impact the number of Australians — increasing numbers of whom already use VPN services — getting through.”
But due to the ruling, rightsholders now have the ability to add new torrent sites to a list that ISPs are required to block. For a nominal fee of about $36.50 per URL, content creators can add a new torrent site to Australia’s blacklist.
And there’s a grim future ahead for torrents in the global war on online piracy. Nations all over the world are ruling in favor of the entertainment industry, and forcing ISPs to block pirating websites or risk consequences. A French court issued a similar ruling to French ISPs this week that would require them to block major pirating sites the Pirate Bay, LimeTorrents, TorrentReactor, and TorrentFunk. A national pirate blacklist for the United Kingdom has over 500 URLs as of November. Since August, users in India who accessed a torrent site receive a warning that downloading illegal content could bring them a three-year jail sentence.
Silicon Valley has grown increasingly compliant to demands from Hollywood and the U.S. recording industry to buckle down on illegal content. Several prominent movie-torrenting sites last week mysteriously disappeared from Google’s search results, for example.
But potentially complicating the global war on online piracy is President-elect Donald Trump‘s contentious relationship with Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The rightsholders in the Australian case included some of Hollywood’s biggest film studios, including Roadshow Films, Foxtel, Disney, Paramount, Columbia, and 20th Century Fox.
Murdoch last year stepped down as CEO of 20th Century Fox, which owns Fox News. The global media company is now run by Murdoch’s son, James. Murdoch—a climate change denier whose vast media empire gave him a control of sculpting the Western’s world’s narrative on global warming—worked in partnership with Roger Ailes to turn Fox News into the conservative media empire it is today. Ailes, who stepped down from Fox News this summer following sexual assault allegations by female Fox News employees, briefly served as an advisor to Trump.
Murdoch allegedly convinced Fox News debate moderators to push Trump on certain issues during this year’s Republican primary debates, according to Newsweek.
“Murdoch’s been very bad to me,” Trump told New York magazine back in April.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIIA), the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry, sent Trump a letter this week asking him to support stricter protocols on safeguarding intellectual property. The RIAA accused technology companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Google of not doing enough to deter theft.
“Search engines, user upload content platforms, hosting companies, and domain name registrars and registries should follow others’ example to effectively stop theft and assure fair payment,” wrote the RIAA in its letter.
The letter came in advance of Trump’s meeting on Wednesday with Silicon Valley leaders, including Alphabet’s Larry Page and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
