Estranged Bedfellows – but who will be on top?

Despite a seeming genuine willingness to develop co-operative models to address issues of illegal file sharing, the views of rights holders and ISP’s remain polarised.

The Communications Alliance has been involved in discussions with the Australian Copyright Industry Group over the past six months, in an attempt to develop an industry-led model to deal with file sharing issues. “The industry is working to develop a cooperative model that discourages improper file-sharing, promotes the availability of affordable and legal sources of content for all Australian consumers, apportions fairly the costs involved, ensures natural justice rights for consumers and allows ISPs to legally go about their business,” stated Comms Alliance CEO John Stanton.

But will ISPs and rights holders see eye to eye, particularly on how to stop illegal sharing?

“AFACT and its members have always been open to genuine negotiation – but bearing in mind the Full Federal Court said that ISPs are responsible for infringements on their network, they’ve said that it is reasonable for ISPs to send warnings to their customers if they infringe copyright, they’ve said it’s reasonable for ISPs to take other steps beyond that if customers ignore those warnings, and they’ve said it’s reasonable for account holders to be held responsible for all activities on their account,” is the position of AFACT.

(Source: Comms Day)

iiTrial : Round 3 appeal set for High Court

The High Court of Australia on Friday granted film and television studios the right to appeal against the decision made earlier in the year in the case against Australian ISP iiNet.

The approval means the studios will have the opportunity to argue against the interpretation of the laws concerning copyright infringement by authorisation, rather than the facts of the case made against iiNet.

A group of 34 parties, comprised of most major Australian and American film studios, took iiNet to court in 2009 after claiming iiNet had “authorised” its users to download pirated movies and television over the Internet. After the original decision of not guilty made in February last year was appealed, the Australian Federal Court ruled in February this year that iiNet was not responsible for the illegal downloading.

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(Source: Delimeter)

Caution over Monopolies

Cast your mind back to the 1998 to Miscorsoft anti competitive case and the browser wars. Well the notion of digital dominance is still with us with Google and Apple the populist villians.

In Google’s case, there are continuing concerns on it’s practices of selectively lowering page ranking on sites ‘they’ deem unworthy if it is some type of ‘paid for’ content. The latest concern is in Google’s efforts to digitise all the recorded knowledge of the world and exerting a monoplisitc control over millions of out of print and hard to get books. In the long term it could potentially give Google contol over how all of the wolrds knowledge could be accessed via it’s serach engine technologies.

Google are not all bad – apps such as Google Earth, Google Maps, Gmail and their slew of free offerings have transformed many peoples live including my own.

Even the pot is calling the kettle black (Microsoft Accuse Google of Anti-Competitive Practices)

Apple are in the same boat with the vertical integration of  it’s software and hardware platforms. The UK office of Fair Trading is investigating pricing anomolies. Anyone with an iPad will know how difficult it is to divorce it from iTunes. iTunes has been under the spotlight since 2007 but Apple are increasingly leveraging distribution control over music, movies, digital magazine publication and applications via iTunes.

When the iPhone was launched it tied consumers to a single carrier (AT&T) freezing out any competition.

The question is then… should individual global commercial behemouths control how the world access all knowledge, culture and heritage in the ever advancing digital domain. Of course not. The recording and distribution of knowledge survived the supression of the church over hundreds  of years as it must do know with digital denominations.

And spare a thought for Tim Berners Lee, who inventer hypertext which spawned the evolution of the interent as we know it today – who essentially gave it away by making it an open protocol and is the foundation stone on which these digital cartels are built.