Thou shall not infringe copyright #iidallas | ABC Adelaide
In the wake of the ruling that compelled iiNet and other ISP providers to release the names and contact details of 4,726 account holders that may have downloaded the movie Dallas Buyers Club, there’s been lots of discussion about this being a watershed moment in Australia and illegal downloading, but to me this is a far more interesting conversation than piracy and downloading as Sonya Feldhoff of ABC radio Adelaide and I chatted about what this ruling really means.
Lets get the basics out-of-the-way:
- downloading is not illegal in Australia, it never has been and is likely never to be, it is copyright infringement that is at stake here.
- the court has to yet to accept the letter of demand that will be sent to those thought likely of infringing so it is unlikely that huge penalties will be sought.
- it is not going to be easy to find the real culprits if many of these are internet cafe’s, businesses or commercial entities, or if they’re teenagers what happens then. And
- if they do find a culprit and they refuse to pay, will it be worth the effort and expense to bring them to court?
I am not condoning what they are claimed to have done. Stealing is stealing and we have for far too long had a sense of digital entitlement believing that if we can access it on our screens we’re entitled to have it for free, regardless of who owns it, or the pains they went through to create it.
To me this was a PR victory at best, it has many people talking about it.
But the deeper issue here is that once again we are enacting laws and becoming self-righteous after the fact.
This technology and this activity has been around for a long time, we could have enacted laws and adjusted cultural norms long before this and now that we have it’s all too late.
There will of course be people who will download into the future, but it is far more likely that soon this will be far less common as we move closer to what happened in the music industry, where we moved from buying an album, to buying a song, to illegally pirating a song and now on to relatively low spend subscription models where we can legally listen to as many songs as we want to for one all-inclusive price.
The ease and ubiquity of subscribing has made it far easier to have the music you want on any device at any time and has been the catalyst for the drop in illegal music downloads, it has also changed the income artists, writers and distributors make and forced many artists to re-imagine how they can earn money from their music, causing
many to go back on the road and tour, sign merchandising deals and extend beyond their craft into other business.
Movie watching and creation will follow a similar path. In Australia we are beginning to see the move away from the dominance of free to air and cable, to on demand movie services offering low monthly all-inclusive subscriptions.
We are also seeing content creation moving beyond the traditional movie studios into the every-person space and the growth of video broadcasting services like vine and periscope democratise video creation and distribution.
It is far more likely that as our smart TV’s and phones come loaded with more and more features that make it easy to subscribe to and watch low-cost all you can devour services, that we will forego the difficulty of finding
and downloading a movie to instead watching it legally anywhere at anytime.
Beyond this is the notion and worth of copyright. It once made perfect sense as a protection tool, but it is expensive, unwieldy and time-consuming.
In today’s fast paced, always innovating world, are copyright’s and trademarks still viable?
The answer is often no.
As good as they are, they may not readily suit future fast paced business needs. So how, if at all, do we protect our intellectual property in this brave new world?
The problem with our response to the future is that is so often predicated on our past behaviors and thinking and increasingly what we did and wanted before, are not the best indicators of what we will want and do tomorrow.
Perhaps instead we should have the legal and cultural debate at the beginning of a technology’s existence, not after its imminent demise.
Have a listen to the segment now (22 minutes 19 seconds), share this round and let’s get the debate started.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What has the internet actually done to the economics of copyright and intellectual property?
The internet has changed the economics of copyright in three fundamental ways: it has reduced the marginal cost of reproduction to near zero, which destroys the scarcity model that traditional copyright relied upon to generate value; it has made copyright infringement trivially easy and technically undetectable at scale, which has shifted enforcement from prevention to detection and response; and it has created a global distribution infrastructure that allows creators to reach audiences directly without the intermediaries (publishers, labels, studios, distributors) who historically justified their economic participation in part by controlling access to distribution infrastructure. The economic consequence is that the value in content industries has migrated from the reproduction and distribution of content to the creation of access, curation, community, and experience around it — streaming, subscription, and platform models reflect this migration.
Q: What is the ethical framework individuals should apply to digital copyright in practice?
The ethical framework for digital copyright involves distinguishing between: personal use of content you have legitimately accessed (generally covered by fair use provisions and widely accepted as reasonable); sharing content with others without compensation to creators (which deprives creators of the economic signal that guides future creation, even when the marginal harm to any individual creator is small); and commercial use or large-scale distribution of others’ work without permission (which causes direct and measurable economic harm). The practical challenge is that the ease and normalisation of digital sharing has eroded the intuitive sense that reproduction of digital content is taking something — the physical analogy of walking out of a shop with a book without paying is not how digital copyright violation feels, which is part of why compliance rates are low and enforcement is difficult. The ethical position is that creators deserve economic recognition for their work regardless of the ease of circumventing it.
Q: How is AI changing the copyright landscape in ways that the 2015 framework did not anticipate?
The AI copyright challenges emerging in 2024-2026 represent a genuinely new set of questions that the existing copyright framework was not designed to answer: whether training AI systems on copyrighted content without permission or compensation constitutes infringement is currently before multiple courts in multiple jurisdictions without settled law; whether AI-generated content that resembles human-created work violates copyright, and whether AI-generated content can itself be copyrighted, are open questions; and the economic harm to creators from AI systems trained on their work and now capable of producing similar work at scale is real even where the legal status is unsettled. The copyright framework will need to evolve substantially to address these questions, and the outcomes of current litigation will set important precedents.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a digital economy, intellectual property, or creator economy keynote?
Contact the booking team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
In the wake of the ruling that compelled iiNet and other ISP providers to release thenames and contact details of 4,726 account holders that may have downloaded themovie Dallas Buyers Club, there’s been lots of discussion about this being awatershed moment in Australia and illega.
When signals like Thou shall not infringe copyright #iidallas emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether Thou shall not infringe copyright #iidallas will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
