Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move Australian Greens amendments (3), (7) and (8) on sheet 7710:

(3) Schedule 1, item 1, page 3 (lines 15 and 16), omit " , or to facilitate the infringement of, " .

(7) Schedule 1, item 1, page 4 (lines 10 and 11), omit " , or the flagrancy of the facilitation of the infringement, " .

(8) Schedule 1, item 1, page 4 (lines 14 and 15), omit " , or facilitate an infringement of, " .

What these three amendments do collectively is remove the way that the bill is drafted at the moment, which allows rights holders to seek court injunctions to target sites that facilitate copyright infringement, as opposed to 'enable' copyright infringement. There has been a lot of commentary through the Senate inquiry and outside the Senate inquiry process that has been very concerned about the breadth of the term 'facilitate' as it applies to copyright infringement. It is unnecessarily broad, and it is unclear. It could be used to, for example, take down cloud computing storage sites or services that link shortening sites or social media sites. It could be used to take down sites that provide technical tools that have entirely legitimate uses—for example, sites that provide large file transfer software such as WeTransfer and others. These services absolutely could be argued to facilitate copyright infringement. There is nothing stopping you from, for example, using a file transfer platform like WeTransfer to transfer a copyright infringing item from one party to another. That is absolutely not why that tool was built and it is not why the vast majority of users would use a service like that. Nonetheless, it can be swept up.

The government will probably argue that the bill is drafted tightly enough as it is. I would take strong issue with that. If this is to be targeted we should not be including language as broad as 'facilitating'. I will again quote from page 7 of the Australian Digital Alliance submission:

The Macquarie dictionary defines 'facilitation' as:

1. to make easier or less difficult; help forward (an action, a process, etc.).

2. to assist the progress of (a person): to facilitate the customer to find the right product.

This is immensely broad language. It is exceptionally broad language for a bill that covers the consequences of knocking websites and platforms offline. They continue:

This could conceivably cover a number of online locations offering products that have legitimate uses, but which may also be used assist in copyright infringement. VPNs—

and I will be dealing with VPNs in a separate amendment shortly—

cloud storage providers, providers of Bit Torrent or Internet Relay Chat ('IRC') software, browser plug ins or conversion tools may all be covered, as may blogs or subreddits discussing techniques or sites that may be used to infringe. A project such as Open Rights Group's attempt to transparently list the sites that have been blocked under the UK legislation may have a primary purpose of facilitating copyright infringement if the majority of users used the list to find sites with infringing content.

And that is irrespective of the motives of those who put that list up there. Again, if we are going to have site blocking legislation such as this on the statute books—effectively an internet filter managed through the courts by foreign rights holders—shouldn't we ensure that it is targeted absolutely as narrowly as possible, not at things that facilitate copyright infringement but at things that infringe copyright? That is the distinction we are seeking to draw here. Senator Collins did indicate the position on the half of the opposition a short time ago. I would love to hear from the government why you would be knocking over a perfectly sensible amendment such as this.