Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

From 6 pm to 8 pm—thank you, Member for Melbourne Ports. I know you will go along because of your support for artistic endeavours. There is a great artist, a musician, now a painter, finding it hard to extract an income from his artistic endeavours. As an author I know how difficult that is as well. I understand the difficulties of emerging artists in particular in trying to develop a sustainable income. These are very difficult industries, whether it be cinema, writing, music or whatever, to get a foothold in. And in this modern world of illegal downloading it is even harder to make a buck. It would be a sad day indeed if the only way for an up-and-coming rock star—U2, Midnight Oil or the like—to make a dollar would be to actually busk and perform live rather than sell their product not just to Australia but to the world, something that Australian musicians, cinematographers and theatre producers have done so well.

The bill will not solve this difficult problem but it will be a small common-sense measure that will disrupt the foreign websites which are acting as havens for piracy and may discourage those one in three Australian consumers from participating in this practice. It is a practice that sabotages the artistic endeavours of the very artists we admire and support. Obviously, we do not download the material from artists whom we do not admire, respect and support. So it is a conundrum. As the member for Greenway touched on, if people had the opportunity, they would be prepared to pay something that is reasonable. But we come down to those problems of price and timing.

I stress up-front for those people who are interested and I am talking particularly to one of my constituents Nerdy Nigel—that is his Twitter name—that this bill does not provide an internet filter of any kind. It provides—and this is important in a week where we are celebrating the 800th Anniversary of the Magna Carta—a judicial remedy. A judge will decide whether the conduct involved breaches our Australian law and each case will be decided on its merits—something that all Australians would obviously be supportive of. This bill will provide for the owner of a copyright to apply for an injunction to require a carriage service provider to take reasonable steps to disable access to an online location.

An injunction, as any lawyer would know, is a serious remedy to seek. So the bill provides that, before a court can grant an injunction, the court must be satisfied that the primary purpose of the website is to infringe copyright or to facilitate the infringement of copyright. I repeat again: the carriage service provider, the CSP, will be impacted on only if the court is satisfied that the primary purpose is to infringe copyright or to facilitate the infringement of copyright.

The primary purpose test is built into the bill and is a high threshold for the applicant to meet and that is a necessary protection for CSPs so that they are not targeted if their main purpose is actually a legitimate purpose. Some examples of legitimate purposes include an art gallery website, which is operated from another country, or even the iTunes store, a site where I seem to be investing most of my disposable income. I have moved on from cassettes—that was not so good—CDs were also not a wise decision. I am now investing in iTunes.

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