The Australian parliament has passed legislation last year allowing rights holders to ask a court for a website-blocking injunction to be applied for piracy sites. Take advantage of this legislation, a group of “the world’s largest record companies have joined forces” to restrict access to torrent site ‘Kickass Torrents’. The first use of the legislation came in February this year when Foxtel and Village Roadshow put forward their case for internet service providers to block local (Australia) access to sites like “The Pirate Bay” and “SolarMovie”.
This group has also applied to block related proxy sites, making it more difficult for Kickass Torrent operators to employ quick workarounds to restore Australian access. ARIA members Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music said that the site “exploited creativity of others and gave nothing back to artists, songwriters, record labels and music publishers who had their music stolen.”
This is a big step and potentially important step for the music industry who has seen a major decline in physical album sales. Music is already a hard business to monetize and capitalize (as opposed to other media industries) and speed + proliferation of music pirating sites has not helped the industry in any way. However, although piracy is clearly illegal, how to solve the problem is not as clear. The next issue that arises is, how do you implement a “block’, should one be implemented by the court? A rift has already emerged in implementing blocks from a technical standpoint. One case puts forward a block on a DNS (domain name system) level, while another case pushes for the blocking of IP addresses URLs. However, IP addresses change rapidly, and domain names can be easily changed....
