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Australian ISP takes copyright enforcement too far |
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Written by Felix Da Silva (fdasilva@bitnip.com)
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Wednesday, 27 June 2007 |
 Copyright enforcement and protection is necessary. However, the Australian ISP Exetel, is taking it a bit too far. They will automatically delete any mp3, mpg, mpeg, avi, wma and any other multi media file type on their server every night, even if the content is non infringing.
According to Exetel's support website, it states:
Based on the MIPI's actions in March 2005 aganst another ISP (People Telecom)
and the actual finding guilty of a second ISP in July 2005 (ComCen), Exetel now
believe there is a need to take more direct and pro-active action to monitor
content stored on publicly accessible servers under its control.
It goes on to say:
Effective from 1st April 2005 scripts will be run nightly that will examine all
disk content and delete any multimedia content with the extensions mp3, mpg,
mpeg, avi, wma and any other multi media file type. Customers wishing to host
files with these extensions need to do the following:
- 1. Email
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
and request to be excluded from the scan
script.
- 2. State that you agree you are the copyright owner, have
permission of the copyright owner or that there is no copyright on the material
you want to store.
I am all for copyright enforcement but removing any material without first notifying them about how you are the copyright owner of such content is taking it too far. This only inconveniences the regular user that wants to host a video of their picnic or any other legitimate content.
If you are a real pirate, you probably won't use the little amount of space that is provided to you by the ISP. Secondly, this so called enforcement system is easy to get around. All you have to do is just make the extension into something else such as .abc and once downloaded, rename it to .mp3 or whatever the the original extension was and it will play without problems.
Perhaps it is because of Australian law that Exetel is so aggressive about copyright
enforcement, but the ISP's approach of treating its customers as being "guilty
until proven innocent" is disturbing. Let's hope that other countries does not adopt that point of view.
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