David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is good to speak on this very important area of copyright law and copyright reform. I think it is important at the outset to reflect on why this legislation is necessary. The reason that it is necessary is because of changes in technology. The growth of the internet has been massively beneficial to society in so many ways—education, health care, entertainment, news, you name it. But, as in all things, there has been a downside. One of the difficulties that has arisen in the internet age is it has made it very relatively simple to commit acts of piracy. There was probably always there a human capacity to engage in piracy. It is just that online technology makes it so much easier. As a consequence of that, the amount of piracy has grown quite substantially to the point where it is a very serious threat to legitimate businesses.

The other issue with the internet and distribution online is not only is it relatively simple for consumers to engage in acts of piracy but it is also relatively difficult to track down the source of those acts of piracy in the geographical sense. It is not like the old days where a pirate would be perhaps clutching a pirated VHS tape at the local store. This is about content coming from all around the world and from many different locations. As a consequence, it has been a very difficult problem for government to address and to seek to minimise the impact of piracy.

There are two categories of business that are negatively affected by piracy. Both of those categories of business deserve the right to be protected against unlawful piracy. The first is producers. We hear a lot about the Australian production industry. We have a proud tradition in this nation of punching above our weight in video production, in film, in television and so on. The capacity for people to make use of that programming without paying for it obviously has a significant negative impact on those local producers and protecting their rights is important.

There is also another category of businesses that do not actually produce the content but buy the right to distribute it. Their rights are equally important. That content is not always produced in Australia but the rights to distribute it are obtained in Australia. It is very important that government acts sensibly to minimise the piracy wherever it can.

It is worth thinking about why this space has changed so dramatically. If you think through the different modes of video distribution and how they have changed in recent years, it provides a pretty clear insight into why reform in this area has been needed. Focusing on video distribution, there is a wide range of traditional formats and some new ones. Perhaps the oldest of all is theatrical release. In the old world, the first distribution of a film would be in a theatre. There was no capacity in a practical sense for that film to be accessed or distributed prior to the theatrical release and, consequently, there was not a major problem. Now of course we have a situation where people can attend a theatrical releases in other countries, they can make a copy of that movie and then they can distribute it online on the same day. That may be months ahead of when the theatrical release is due to be distributed in Australia.

The same applies to free-to air-television. I am sure you will fondly remember the days of when the television programs would be seen in Australia. We would all wait for the Australian release of the program often some months after it was broadcast in the US and other countries. There was no suggestion that anyone would be able to access that program beforehand. But now you can because as soon as it is released in other countries, particularly the United States, those online copies are often available.

The same applies to videos and DVDs. DVDs were copied and continue to be copied. There continues to be copyright infringement in physical formats but, again, the complexity of actually going and getting a copied DVD, of selling it and distributing is a much higher order than it is of simply putting something online. And, as a consequence, online distribution is so much greater.

We now have an emerging set of legitimate online distributers of video. Over the past seven or eight years, as internet speeds have been sufficient to distribute video online, the industry has been principally based around what is called 'ad-supported distribution'. Also known as 'catch-up TV', it is where a program, after distribution or broadcast, is shown online and advertising is sold against that. The problem for content owners is that once a program has been broadcast on free-to-air television there are often free copies being distributed online without ads in them. That is a very compelling proposition for consumers—watch something without ads, or watch it with ads. Unfortunately, many consumers are choosing to watch those pirated copies. The same applies to transaction video on demand and increasingly subscription video on demand, where we are seeing the rise of services like Stan, Netflix and others. What copyright owners deserve is for fair rules of play to be imposed across the system so that people's intellectual property is protected.

In a moment I will come to the specific provisions of this bill, which will go a long way to solving this significant problem, but I also want to touch on another issue in the area of online copyright. It concerns the use of the facilitation of copyright infringement through the distribution of internet protocol boxes, or IP boxes, as they are known. This is an important issue for a number of pay TV broadcasters, some of which are very important in my community, in the Chinese language community, in the Arabic-speaking community and in a range of other communities as well.

We face a situation today where in some retail stores in Sydney it is possible to buy an IP box which is effectively sold on the promise that it will enable you to access a range of copyright-infringing material. You buy the box, and it is configured in such a way that it accesses content which is legitimately pay TV content but which is being sourced unlawfully from another jurisdiction and provided at no cost to the consumer. Those retailers and distributors are effectively facilitating the breach of copyright.

The provisions in the bill that we are discussing today go right back to the source of the infringing material, right back to those unlawful channels, unlawful sites and so on. It is also important to reflect on entities that are contributing to online infringement through the sale of IP boxes which are specifically designed to encourage copyright infringement. Companies like TVB, World Media and others face this issue every day, and it is a very important one.

This legislation is going to be of enormous help in reducing the incidence of copyright infringement, and it takes a very practical approach. It is a very complex area—there are people all around the world involved in copyright infringement. It is incumbent on legislators to be practical and to think about how legislation such as this will work in the real world. This will be effective, because this enables an entity who feels that its copyright has been breached to seek an order requiring an ISP to effectively block access to that infringing material. But most of the time that infringing material will be sourced from overseas.

In a practical sense, it is very difficult for Australian law to go after a copyright-infringing service that might be based in Kazakhstan—or in any part of the world, for that matter. But what we can do is require ISPs who are based in Australia and subject to our laws to act to minimise the likelihood of copyright-infringing activities occurring. That basically requires the ISPs to block access to sites or other online locations that are engaging in infringing activity. The ISPs themselves have done nothing wrong, and importantly this legislation makes that clear. There is no suggestion that the ISPs themselves are engaged in copyright-infringing material. But going to the source and blocking the relevant service will go a long way to reducing the incidence of copyright infringement. So it is a very practical solution.

It is also important that the legislation provides that, for an order to be issued by the court requiring an ISP to take down material, the primary purpose of the online location must be copyright infringement. What that means is that if a site is engaged in legitimate activity, such as Netflix, based in the US, the fact that an individual in Australia might be accessing that site in a manner which infringes copyright does not mean in and of itself that Netflix is engaged in activity which should be blocked, and that is a really important distinction.

This legislation basically goes after entities whose business model is to infringe copyright. It is extremely important that this occurs. Just as in any other industry people have a right to be protected against theft of their physical or intellectual property, so should people involved in our creative industries, who employ so many Australians and do so much good work.

The good news is that the injunction powers that are proposed by this law have been effective in the UK, in Ireland, in Singapore and in other jurisdictions, and again the capacity for the copyright owner to simply seek for the offending site to be blocked by the ISP is the most practical possible way of addressing this problem. I concur with others in this debate in saying that I think the way that this will play out is that in the early days you will probably see a number of court actions initiated. You will see some court orders issued for take-down notices for infringing material. But then what will happen, logically, over time, is that ISPs and content providers will work together in a sensible way. No doubt they will circumvent much of that court formality and work together in a constructive fashion to take down offending material, and that is as it should be.

These are very sensible steps. They are practical. They are not going to catch lawful activities. Importantly, they make it clear that ISPs themselves are not engaged in unlawful activity, but they make use of the technical capacity of ISPs to go directly to the source of the problem and seek to solve it. This is a complex area. This is an area of law that will continue to evolve, but these are important provisions, and I strongly commend them to the House.

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