George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I do not have a copy of the Copyright Act with me in the chamber at the moment, but I am familiar with its provisions. There is no doubt that there are criminal offence provisions in the Copyright Act. Those criminal offence provisions are directed to what one might call large scale or commercial scale theft of intellectual property. They are not concerned with unlawful downloading, for example. They are not concerned with what ordinary citizens may perhaps be doing. That is dealt with through the civil law and it will be dealt with in particular by the industry code that is being developed under the auspices of my department and Mr Turnbull's department—and, in relation to offshore pirate sites, by the new injunction power that I just mentioned to you, which is the subject of a bill that was introduced into the House of Representatives yesterday.

This bill is about serious crime. It is about terrorism, organised and transnational crime and paedophilia. That is its entire purpose. That is the mischief that the authorities seek to deal with through this bill.