Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 17 February 2008 12:57
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Net-savvy Victorians denied the chance to watch Channel 9’s hit new
show thanks to a court order preventing its broadcast in the state have
rushed online to download it, with local police threatening to thunder
down upon copyright infringers like a ton of bricks.
Underbelly is the story of the Melbourne gangland wars, but it’s also the story of a court ban causing a suppressed TV show to become much more popular in precisely the state it has been suppresed in.
The ban has taken place because there are still court battles surrounding the 10 year Melbourne underworld war, and the TV show purports to be an accurate representation of what transpired during that time.
This caused the Victorian Supreme Court to suppress the TV series from Victorian TV screens – and from Victorian Internet users from accessing online previews and story descriptions from the Underbelly
website (although other parts of the site are still accessible), in the event jurors in any cases surrounding the events portrayed in the Unberbelly TV show are unduly influenced by the show.
Anyone in Victoria trying to access suppressed parts of the site sees the message: “This functionality is not available due to current legal restrictions”.
Nationwide TV viewer numbers for the show’s first episode were put over 1.3 million people, but given no-one in Victoria was able to watch the show on the free-to-air TV network, Channel 9, the numbers clearly weren’t as high as they would otherwise have been, especially at a time when Channel 9, previously Australia’s No.1 network for years, has lost the top spot to its hated competitor, Channel 7.
So, what have Victorian Interet users interested in the show done? They’ve gone onto Internet p2p sites to download it, of course, much to the chagrin of local police and copyright authorities, alongside Channel 9 themselves, who have promised to track down uploaders and downloaders to prosecute them.
This has sent fear into ‘cappers’, or people who record TV shows, delete the advertisements and often the end credits, and upload them to p2p file sharing networks for anyone to download, with a report from Channel 9’s own half-owned (with Microsoft) online portal
Ninemsn detailing some of the fears of local TV show pirates, some of whom have gone quiet in the face of intense new scrutiny from local copyright authorities.
Please read onto page 2.
