Federal court orders ISPs to block bittorrent websites in Australia

[Aaron]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-15/federal-court-orders-pirate-bay-blocked-in-australia/8116912

Thoughts on this? Are there bigger issues that we should be discussing here (e.g. cost and availability of movies/media here in Australia)?

[KDB]

Completely irrelevant anyway because you can just use one of their other 1400 domains that have been set up, a VPN, another torrenting site, or one of the other workarounds. This ruling won't change a single thing and seems rather pointless.

Agreed. VPN's are easy to set up and use, and the good ones have low yearly fees. You'd also think that by creating harsher laws, they'd impose harsher penalties. From the article: "There is nothing in the act that discusses penalties for people who try to access the sites.".

[brenden]

I feel like it's interesting economics, almost... Like you said Aaron, cost and availability definitely play a role here.

Personally, I've never downloaded a movie. I don't care about the morality of it or whatever, but I'm paranoid about viruses, cbf downloading a shit quality version then trying to find a good one and all that shit.

Usually I stream movies from streaming sites. But I haven't done that in ages given that I got Netflix a few months ago - the $13 a month or whatever is well worth it for me. I would prefer to pay for the media and save myself the tedium.

If people are willing to go through huge levels of effort *not* to pay for something... then perhaps the service/cost isn't worth paying for!

[appleandbee]

 Commenting so that I remember to post my perspective later. I have quite a few angles that I would like to discuss and still figuring out how to organize the subheadings. One thing I'll mention beforehand, issues regarding intellectual property (whether it's tech, arts or science related) consistently receives negative press.

[Deshouka]

An obvious reason why people choose not to pay for movies is simply because there are methods in which you get it for free. Why fork out ~$10 a month for subscriptions when heaps of people are downloading hundreds of movies for zilch? Plus it's the internet and  anonymity only exacerbates moral disengagement.
 
It's akin to downloading textbooks. I'm sure the ATARNotes won't like it if somebody uploads all of their course notes and hardly anybody buys their notes. All that hard work and some kid diminishes it.

The only way to truly understand why people are trying to take down torrent sites is to be in the business of selling textbooks, movies etc. Then maybe, just maybe they'll get a little more sympathy.