Australia Passes Its Own SOPA, Ignores All Concerns About It

by Mike Masnick
Techdirt
Jun. 24, 2015

As was widely expected after getting the greenlight to move forward with the bill, the Australian palirament has now approved its version of SOPA, allowing courts to issue censorship orders to block entire foreign websites outright, with no real recourse. The few Senators who pointed out how problematic this would be appear to have been totally ignored. Scott Ludlam pointed out that this approach was both lazy and dangerous while Senator David Leyonhjelm (from a different party than Ludlam) succinctly explained the problems with the bill:

He notes that it's "vaguely drafted and unlikely to achieve its aims." Furthermore, he notes that it "aims to protect rightsholders at everyone else's expense." As he points out, that's not what Parliament is supposed to be doing. He further highlights how ridiculous it is that Australia has no fair use -- and to pass stronger enforcement without fixing the problems of Australian copyright law hinders free expression and public use is really ridiculous.

Making matters worse, as Crikey points out, those pushing in favor of the bill were using industry supplied numbers on the economic "losses" of piracy that were so ridiculous as to be literally unbelievable, and yet no one really paid attention. Specifically, it attacks the claims made that piracy is costing the movie industry 6,000 jobs per year, which is pretty bizarre for an industry that only employs about 30,000. But, making matters even worse, the number of jobs in the industry... has been going up, not down:

In the last two years, movie and sound recording has employed, on average, 27,100. The two years before that, it employed on average 27,600. So, decline? Well, the two years before that"‰--"‰2009-11"‰--"‰was employment of 26,600. And over 2007-09 it was 25,200; between 2005 and 2007, some 24,700 worked in the industry.

Employment in that sector allegedly being smashed by piracy is increasing"‰--"‰not uniformly, but substantially. At the end of the 1990s (when George Lucas was making Star Wars here) the industry barely employed 20,000 people. In the mid-1990s, the sub-division employed 13,000"‰--"‰less than half of its current level.

There's more in that report that highlights how the numbers supporters of the bill were using simply don't pass the simplest laugh test. But, alas, Hollywood still gets the last laugh, because the politicians passed it anyway. They'll quickly discover that it won't put a dent in any copyright infringement. Nor will it create new jobs in Australia -- except perhaps for VPN vendors. But there's a decent likelihood that it will lead to less innovation, fewer new services and perfectly legitimate sites getting blocked.

To be honest, the haste with which this bill has moved through the Australian Parliament is exactly how the entertainment industry expected the original SOPA to cruise through Congress. It was only because so many Americans spoke out against it that it was stopped. It's too bad that not enough Australians did the same Down Under.