On the 18th of January, you may have found yourself unable to access a number of American-based websites. Internet staples from Lolcats to Wikipedia blacked out their pages in protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act. Designed to combat “rogue websites” that prevent the “profits from American innovations go(ing) to Americans,”1 the act has drawn the ire of Silicon Valley and all who value a free and open internet. For an Australian comparison, it’s Conroy’s internet filter times a thousand, aimed at shoring up the profits of Hollywood rather than keeping children safe.
The United States has not yet lost its will to maintain international order. After many failed wars and a trillion-dollar debt, one could be forgiven for thinking their ambition might fade, but alas. The act specifically targets foreign websites like The Pirate Bay, who some representatives claim are dedicated to stealing American property. It’s being driven by lobbyists from the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, who in honour of Nicola Roxon I’m going to label “big movies” and “big music” respectively. But the act is vaguely worded, with heavy-handed provisions: five years in jail for streaming illegal content, the ability for the US government to seize IP addresses and domain names as well as cease payment services on an infringing website before accusations can be proven, and burdensome requirements that every single piece of user-generated content be policed on sites like YouTube and Wikipedia. At this stage, the bill is likely to fail.
While property rights are the foundation of capitalist society, the internet and digital intellectual property have made policing the matter infinitely harder than it used to be. Without physical material to be possessed or transported, acquiring such property is almost instantaneous. The MPAA and RIAA claim that this theft means “US worker lose $16.3 billion” annually.2 Apart from their having mistaken “US workers” for “massive US companies that own the rights to what the workers create,” we can probably halve this figure, as it assumes every counterfeit product purchased or downloaded is a forgone legitimate purchase. As someone who’s been guilty of traversing the torrents for free content, I can assure you it’s not.
That’s not at all to say that stealing is a-ok. Software is the new manufacturing battleground, and given we’d call the cops if someone stole our car we shouldn’t view intellectual property any differently. But we do – Australia as a nation is one of the biggest downloaders of pirated or illegally copied content in the world, with an estimated cost to the domestic industry of almost $1.4 billion a year,3 although a halving might again be in order. In various polls, up to 45% of us have admitted to downloading content illegally, with real the real figure likely higher. As internet speeds start to ramp up in Australia (think NBN – 100Mbps, up and down) the problem is sure to get worse.
So how to stem the flow of bits and bytes? If legislative attempts to expand the legal rights of multibillion-dollar companies can be destroyed by one day of internet activism,4 then other solutions must be sought, not just in the US but here. The internet’s culture of free and open access to knowledge has seeped into the commercial realm of entertainment, with which it is incompatible. If Stephen Conroy weren’t so busy trying to stop us watching porn he might have coined an idea by now, but in lieu of that I’m here to help.
Given that such a high percentage of Australian households access this media illegally, and that almost every action online can be tracked and accounted for, I’d like to propose a “bandwidth tax” of sorts. No, it’s not really a tax on bandwidth, but rather a GST-like percentage charge placed on top of the internet bill of every household and business. Treasury could determine a fair levy based somewhere between reality and the claims of the companies, which the government could then pay out to the various organisations we’ve unwittingly stolen from. The tax rate from year to year would change with the stats.
The open-endedness of such a scheme might unsettle some, but my (very rough) estimate of $700 million a year would be but a drop in the ocean of the Commonwealth budget. If we ask nicely, the federal government might even take care of this whole mess for us, sans tax. In the likely event that fails, maximum deviations written in law would smooth out spikes in the tax rate if we have “a big year,” so to speak. Using ABS and census figures, it amounts to an average yearly charge of about $115 if paid only by households with the internet. That’s $9.60 more a month with your bill, adjusted in line with your total internet expenditure. Nothing compared to recent hikes in the electricity tariff.
Australians don’t download pirated content because we’re a pack of evil convict bushrangers – there are multiple and prominent reasons. We get high-rating television shows months later than America and Europe on average. When content is available to stream online, Australians are generally prohibited from viewing or listening to it because of licensing and copyright restrictions, as is the case with most music videos. The extortion we often face at the bricks-and-mortar retail level has been covered extensively in the media, and “big movies” should by now see the irony in sitting through 15 minutes of trailers and anti-piracy warnings – but only on legitimate copies. Add to that the pitiful internet transfer speeds we’ve only beaten in the last four years and you see that Australia’s had a pretty average deal when it comes to the globalisation of media. No wonder we’re now exploiting these tools beyond their potential.
Unfortunately any new tax is bound for the political dustbin, especially after the carbon tax, mining tax, alcopops and ciggie taxes and whatever else the Gillard government bleeds from the nation between now and their inevitable defeat. It may be a bit out-there, but this method of taxation and compensation would allow Australian (and possibly foreign) media companies some recompense for our dirty downloading without criminalising everyone who’s ever used Napster – although technically, many are already classified as such. It would break down international boundaries that, despite the web’s best efforts, remain stubbornly and artificially in place, and it would keep Australians at the forefront of international entertainment and culture whilst getting the industry off the censorship bandwagon for good. It’s gotta be worth a shot lest downloading illegally become lodged in our collective psyche, at which point the debate will degenerate into an anti-big-business bash-fest. By that time it’ll be too late, and cultural industries will no longer do business in, or with, Australia.
P.S. Seriously… what else are y’all planning to do with a $40 billion broadband connection? Watch low-definition home videos on YouTube? Call of Duty? Come On…
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#Protecting_intellectual_property_of_content_creators
[2] http://dpeaflcio.org/pdf/DPE-fs_2010_intellectual_prop.pdf
[3] http://delimiter.com.au/2011/02/17/piracy-costs-australia-1-37-billion-a-year-claims-afact/
[4] http://www.theage.com.au/world/backdown-on-internet-censorship-20120120-1qabk.html














