Why I didn't expect AFACT to appeal

Renai LeMay
Thursday, 25 February 2010 18:34

IT Industry - Strategy

OPINION: It came to me the other night, when I was watching an episode of that excellent TV show The Wire, that the particulars of the drug trade it focuses on are very similar to that of the online copyright infringement struggle.

In both cases, you have a category of users who are highly addicted to a tightly controlled commodity. In The Wire's gritty Baltimore streets, it's dope, coke, sex, and whatever else is going around at the time. In loungerooms around Australia, users are desperately passing around the latest episode of FlashForward, Lost, or even Avatar to get their fix.

Similar too, are the extremes to which enforcement authorities go in order to get a wiretap on the communications devices of their respective junkies. Although probably far too many Australian file sharers talk on the phone about their illegal habits.

Now, the analogy only goes so far. For example, I'd have a lot of difficulty comparing Neil Gane, the executive director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) to that bastard detective Jimmy McNulty, despite Gane's admittable tenacity when it comes to pursuing the case against file sharers.

And it's even harder to imagine iiNet chief Michael Malone as a behind-the-scenes mastermind shuffling money around like the nefarious Stringer Bell, although Malone does sometimes seem to have a hint of Bell's calm demeanour in a crisis, and like the kingpin druglords, Australia's ISPs are undisputably making money from users' habits '” in their case through the daily terabytes of pirate data coursing through their networks.

The degree to which the ISPs are or should policing what that data consists of is the very debate at the heart of the case.