CEO Laurie Patton said the society does not believe that there is sufficient international proof that piracy can be eliminated via government regulation.
The society does say, however, that it supports the need for content to be made available speedily, at reasonable cost and on multiple devices and that the community needs to be educated about the damage piracy does.
"Our concern is that ad hoc government interventions such as the proposed site blocking legislation will not address the problem but will create adverse unintended consequences that are entirely counterproductive and potentially damaging to the Internet," Patton said.
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"This is the sort of unintended damage that we risk reoccurring if the site blocking legislation goes through.
"Requiring more than 400 ISP's to manually block websites will incur significant costs that will inevitably have to be passed on to consumers by way of increased charges."
According to the society, the first response should be timely release of content. “Internationally this is regarded as the best way to discourage unauthorised access. Here in Australia we have only just seen the introduction of streaming (SVOD) services, so it is too early to be taking the "blunt instrument" approach of site blocking," Patton said
"The Internet Society believes that we should wait for at least a year and have a reputable independent organisation undertake research to see if there is a real problem needing action. In the meantime we should introduce a national public awareness campaign to encourage people to access content via legitimate means".
"We also support the Copyright Notice Scheme Code which is about to be introduced. This is the first step in educating people about piracy."
Under the Copyright Notice Scheme, ISP's will send up to three written warnings to households where downloading of pirated content is alleged to be occurring.
