My views on copyright infringement (submitted to the MEAA)

Earlier today ZDNet reported on the Media and Arts Alliance's submission on copyright infringement, where the MEAA (as the peak body for journalists, actors, dancers, photographers and people working across the media) took a position that appeared to support internet filtering.

I have been a member of the MEAA for a number of years - it ensures me some level of protection should I break news in my blog, or in articles I write for other publications, should I report on stories involving whistleblowers.

As soon as I became aware of the MEAA's submission, and had read it in full, I tweeted that I was cancelling my membership , as the views did not reflect my values and views on the topic.

This afternoon the MEAA retracted its submission and committed to a broader member consultation, stating that it opposed an internet filter and censorship.

I've taken back my cancellation, and thought I would share the submission I've made to them regarding my views on copyright infringement.

Why is this being publishing in my eGovAU blog? There's two reasons.

Firstly copyright is a Gov 2.0 topic. Technology has allowed a significant proportion of the material that humans formerly created and distributed physically to be created and distributed digitally, creating enormous legal challenges in the copyright area that governments need to consider.

Government agencies must daily walk a delicate path themselves on how they access, reuse and publish citizen, corporate and their own copyright content - from consultation submissions and user comments on their facebook pages, to images in Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr and videos on YouTube.

Changing the default setting of copyright in government was a key step in enabling open data and remains an area of contention at many levels where agencies and councils are fearful of how material they create may be reused.

On top of this issues around copyright are beginning to step into the physical realm. With 3D printers it becomes possible for many objects to be replicated quickly and cheaply. This challenges the manufacturing sector and arts where registered designs or copyrights are used to protect the unique shape of a bottle, chair, tap, handle, cup or fork. It challenges resellers of parts for cars, toilets and other complex household objects, where it becomes easier to print the needed part than access it through a supplier.

Government needs to ensure it is ready for these challenges - who has the right to make copies of digital or physical assets, to distribute and sell them.


Secondly, copyright issues are one of the areas in which digital and physical norms collide. It's a key battlefield for society in shaping our cultural and legal norms into the future, with everyone having a stake by way of the content we purchase and consume.

It is important for those who wish to influence the future to be actively involved in this debate.


Here's my response to the MEAA:

In looking at copyright infringement online, there's three issues that need to be tackled: 

1. Appropriate access to content
2. Appropriate pricing of content
3. Circumvention of legal access to content 

Taking them one at a time... 

1) Appropriate access to content
It is in the interests of both copyright holders and the community for copyright content to be readily available on a timely basis to the community through appropriate access channels. 

In today's connected world, the time value of content has changed significantly. When content is made available for the first time, anywhere in the world, it immediately becomes the topic of discussion and analysis by the audiences able to access it. 

Where content is held back from certain audiences, such as when television episodes are screened first in Australia days, weeks or years after they are first screened in the US or UK, the time value of this content is greatly diminished, with the Australian audience having ready access to online commentary and reviews which can inadvertently spoil the significant reveals in the content. 

This reduces the value of the material to Australian distributors and audiences, many of whom will choose not to watch content for which they already know the outcome. 

Then, over time, some content's value will increase again as people seek to own it for viewing whenever they please. In this case, where physical stockists choose not to stock this content audiences will seek to find it via other channels, such as overseas stockists online or via websites such as the Pirate Bay. 

Content that is available more rapidly after first screening, and is easily purchasable at any stage from first screening via online or physical stockists, will be more widely consumed, benefiting both the copyright holder and the community. 

Therefore any action on copyright infringement needs to reduce the access gap, ensuring that content is available as soon as possible following first screening, both for immediate consumption and ownership purposes. 

A good example of how this has been done well was with the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who, where the ABC added the content to iView as it was being screened in the UK, and it was then made available through cinemas throughout the day of release. 

This significantly increased the return to the copyright holder, while satisfying the needs of the Australian community who did not have to suffer the frustration of accidentally discovering the plot online while waiting weeks, months, or even years, for the content to become available to them. 

A good example of where this has been done badly has been for the last series of Game of Thrones, where the content could only be accessed legally through Foxtel, at a time that Foxtel deemed appropriate. This was only available in packages which meant that people would have to pay a significant amount of money to simply access a single program, making it uncommercial for households and causing significant community frustration. The series was not even rapidly available for download after screening due to a deal to lock down access. 

As a result the copyright holder missed out on significant potential revenue for the program in Australia and the community became more normalised on bypassing media channels to seek illicit means of accessing content, with more learning how to use torrent and online viewing sites (such as Channel131)


2) Appropriate pricing of content
The second significant factor in copyright infringement is the price barrier to content consumption. Australians pay excessive amounts for many forms of digital content, ranging from audio-visual material through to software. 

The 'Australian premium' paid on content (for example, averaging 33% on iTunes and 25% for movies) is now visible to Australians due to the internet exposing the relative prices of content paid around the world. 

Australian content distributors have resisted these claims, claiming that copyright holders control the price, further aggravating the Australian community, who can see services such as Hulu and Netflicks are able to offer content faster and cheaper than local distributors. 

This has led many Australians to use easy tools to bypass geographic zoning by IP address to access Hulu and Netflicks, or establish US and UK accounts on iTunes and similar services to access content that is more highly priced in Australia.
While it is understandable that Australian distributors seek to maximise their profits, this is a short-term strategy that encourages Australians to seek alternative ways to access content. 

This is not only concerning for the ongoing existence of local distributors, but also impacts the tax base, where content is purchased from overseas or accessed illicitly. 

Any program for reducing copyright infringement must seriously tackle the issue of content pricing in Australia, ensuring that Australians pay a fair price for digital content where there is no additional transport or content distribution costs. 

Without this effort, any form of penalty-based infringement approach will fail and more than fail - driving more and more Australians to establish international accounts in order to access content cost-effectively (without infringement) and thereby undermining local content distributors in the mid-long term.

3) Circumvention of legal access to content
The notion that instituting a penalty-based approach to copyright infringement will solve the issue of piracy is flawed while the issues of access and price are unresolved. 

Australian copyright holders and distributors need to stop attempting to use legal and political means to stave off the collapse of their industry, and adapt their business models to the new realities - content is abundant, digital content is easily distributable and people will pay a fair price for content where it is available on the channels they want, when they want. 

Establishing technical barriers to accessing content is flawed as individuals can use tools such as TOR to bypass identification approaches and access content from overseas services. 

Only a minority of Australians use Torrent-based tools for downloading content (and predominantly these are not reliant on sites like the Pirate Bay to access and download content). 

Many Australians also use services such as Channel 131 and watchseries.lt which allow viewing of content on demand without downloading while featuring advertising from Australian companies. 

While blocking the IP addresses for these sites is physically possible, it runs the risk of blocking hundreds of thousands of other sites using the same IP addresses. Also the process for these sites to change IP takes seconds, rendering any IP-blocking approach ineffective. 

When looking at the issuance of notices by ISPs and the retention of data for detection of copyright infringement, this would purely be undertaken at the behest of the organisations who claim to be suffering loss, copyright holders and distributors. 

As such expecting ISPs to pay the charges and costs associated with this effort is inappropriate and represents a blatant attempt by the copyright lobby to transfer its costs to another industry while pocketing any profit increases it receives as a result. 

That's predatory behaviour and is totally inappropriate, similar to holding Australia Post responsible for the cost of opening every package and issuing notices where it found DVDs illicitly parallel imported. 

Even worse is the notion of restricting internet access to households where infringement is detected. This approach could severely penalise people unconnected with infringement, particularly in share houses, in family situations and where wifi hijacking is taking place, not to mention the likelihood that every free public wifi network would disappear in short order. 

Several countries have already added internet access as a human right and while this hasn't yet happened in Australia, there are many ways in which losing access to the internet, or reducing internet access speeds, severely disadvantages individuals and households - in areas from education to health care, employment and even prevents legal and paid access to content that copyright holders make available online. 

If the copyright industry wishes to chase individuals for copyright infringement they are welcome to do so. If their concern is that they'll look bad, well tough. There is no legal or moral justification for copyright holders to make ISPs the bad guys in order to preserve their own images. 

Overall, copyright infringement is not the black and white situation that copyright holders in Australia seek to make it appear. Their claims of loss have been proven to be vastly overstated (http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Piracy-China-USITC-RIAA-MPAA,news-7120.html) and their refusal to provide timely and fairly priced access to content is a leading reason why Australians are choosing to use illicit means to access content. 

If the copyright industry wishes to reduce infringement, it must take steps to improve content access and pricing. It must also demonstrate a commitment to using Australia's existing laws to crackdown on any residual copyright infringement. 

Only if these approaches fail to impact on the level of infringement activity would it be acceptable to consider additional infringement powers - and these should be at the cost of the organisations who will profit from compliance, the copyright holders and distributors.

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Kudos to Queensland government for taking a fun approach to their Premiers Awards for Open Data

Some of you might be aware that at the red carpet event for GovHack 2014 in Brisbane, the Queensland government's Assistant Minister to the Premier on e-government, Ray Stevens, announced the Premiers Awards for Open Data.

The Awards are a competition to come up with the best use of the 1,400 datasets released by the queensland government as open data in their data.qld.gov.au open data catalogue.

The competition has $77,000 in prizes up for grabs, and is fully international, open to anyone, anywhere in the world, without a requirement for any team members to be based in Queensland.

The competition is open until 26 September - so get your entries in.

Now to the kudos - normally these types of government open data competitions are rather dull affairs, with little in the way of fun or exciting promotion.

In this case however, Queensland has gone a little further than other states or countries, making a promotional video that takes a step away from the technical talk and has a little fun in the process while costing next to nothing.

It's the kind of approach we need to see more of from government - a little rough, a little fun and very sincere. View it below, then don't forget to enter!

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92% of Australia's federal politicians now use Facebook and/or Twitter

I've been tracking the number of Australian Federal politicians using Australia's leading social channels for two years now, seeing the number using at least one of Facebook and Twitter grow from 79% in April 2012 to 90% in November 2013 to a current level of 92%.

What's even more interesting is in the details, which you'll find in my thoughts below.

 To access the raw data and statistics, go to my latest Google Doc at: docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdFhaQ1gzdzg3d1VWcFJpSl91bkQwbWc&usp=sharing

While the overall use of social media is at 92.48%, or 209 out of 226 federal politicians (150 Members of the House of Representatives and 76 Senators), the situation is very different between the houses.

The House of Representatives has a far greater level of social media use at 95.33% compared to the Senate at 86.84%. The gap has remained consistent with my last review in November 2013, where it was 92.67% compared to 85.14%. Senators, on average, are slightly older than Representatives (51.55yrs versus 50.19yrs), which is likely a factor, as is the consideration that Senators don't campaign in the same way as Representatives due to the difference in how they are elected and who they represent (states/territories, not electorates).

I still believe that Senators are missing a trick here - due to their different responsibilities in most cases they represent much larger electorates and thus social media can be of value for listening to and engaging with people they can't as easily drive out to see face-to-face.

This rationale also carries over to Representatives with geographically large electorates, such as in the NT, WA, SA and Qld.

I am particularly glad to see that the Nationals, who focus on rural and regional seats and were previously the party whose elected politicians were least likely to engage online, has picked up their act in this area, and 19 of their 20 elected members now uses social media, a greater proportion that either Labor or Liberals (and I count Qld LNP Nationals as Nationals federally).

Social media remains very important for smaller parties to get their message out, with the Greens maintaining their 100% use of social media and every other minor party (KAP, PUP, DLP, Family First) and independent politician using social to some extent.

I see the same trends we've seen in previous years from politicians, and the population in general, still hold true.

Similar to my past reviews, female politicians are more likely to use social channels than male politicians, though by a smaller margin (4% rather than 7%) than previously.


Equally, the older a politician is, the less likely they are to engage on social media, with a clear divide by decade.


This reflects the same phenomenon as we see in the community - with politicians aged 60+ far less likely to use online channels for engagement, and those aged under 45 likely to use it as one of their primary ways to communicate and collect information.

This tends to suggest that the maturity of political decisionmaking regarding the internet is likely to continue to improve as older politicians retire and younger digital natives take their place.

For your reviewing pleasure, below is an infographic with some of the key statistics, please have a play with the interactive elements - they provide an interesting view of how actively different groups of politicians engage via Twitter and Facebook.

Australian Federal politicians - Twitter and facebook use - AUG 14 | Create Infographics

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Young people in Australia are highly engaged in politics - but engagement has moved online. Have governments?

A few years ago I heard it said by political advisors that one hand-written letter to a Minister counts for more than 100 emails on the same topic.

The perception was that if someone sat down and wrote their thoughts in long-hand it showed more interest and commitment than if they typed and posted them online in a blog, social network or website.

I believe this has changed slightly, with emails now accorded almost equal status with postal mail (largely by treating them in the same manner as postal mail, which isn't always appropriate).

However the value placed on blog posts or social media commentary by both politicians and departments still remains far lower than the value that individuals using these channels place on their communication via these channels.

This discrepancy becomes particularly concerning when looking at the level of political activity amongst younger and older people in Australia.

Based on the 'traditional' forms of political engagement - joining political parties, participating in street protests, writing letters and otherwise using physical means to communicate political views - young people are generally considered unengaged, even disconnected, from politics.

This appeared to be supported by a recent study by the University of Canberra commissioned by the Museum of Australian Democracy. (reported on by the ABC and Hijacked)

This study found that, based on these traditional forms of engagement, young people were far less engaged than older people. In fact people aged under 35 were only about half as engaged as those over 70 years old, and were the least engaged of any age group.

Source: ABC Lateline

However, the study went much further, looking at modern forms of political engagement - blogging, tweeting, memes, apps and other digital techniques - as well.

When combining traditional and modern forms of engagement the situation was very, very different.

Suddenly young people were just as engaged as the oldest Australians and more engaged than many of the age groups inbetween.

On this basis, including both marching in the streets and creating online petitions, young people are quite engaged in politics in Australia, with a large amount of their engagement occurring online rather than offline.

This can be hard for older Australians to grasp - they often don't understand the internet as younger people do, having been brought up on newspapers, radio and television.

Not coincidentally, a disproportionate number of our politicians, top bureaucrats, corporate leadership and leading journalists fall into these older groups - therefore they are often not equipped to even see, let alone understand, the ways in which younger people are engaging politically.

This divide isn't necessarily a problem, but it could become one. When insisting that young people follow the same political approaches as their elders, older people are devaluing newer forms of political expression and underestimating its reach and force.

Where politicians, departmental Secretaries and CEOs gauge the public's mood by signals such as how many people show up to protest, they may overlook the new signals, when hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people organise and protest online, until it is too late for them to change course.

There have already been examples of how politicians, media and CEOs have misread the public mood as they still rely on traditional, rather than modern political signals.

Until our 'elders' begin to recognise that times have changed and continue to change, they will continue to be blindsided as innovation continues in political protests.

For example, there was the creation of the Stop Tony Meow plug-in for Chrome, which replaces images of Tony Abbott in the web browser with pictures of kittens. The plug-in has been downloaded over 11,000 times and attracted significant media coverage as an anti-Coalition political statement.

There's also been the recent Dolebludger app available for Android mobile devices, which allows someone to send job application emails in a matter of seconds to 40 Coalition MPs, meeting the proposed monthly job application requirement. This was designed specifically as a political protest against a policy seen by the creator (and many public commentators) as absurd.

On top of this we have the endless string of memes created using free online tools which take photos of politicians and adds text to make a political point. These are then shared widely on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other platforms.

And, more disturbingly, we've recently seen hackers take down a stock exchange and call on the nation's president to take action on a given matter under threat of having confidential financial data released publicly. Where did this last form of political protest occur? In Syria - a country not known as a bastion of democracy.

Similarly striking into illegal behaviour, we've recently seen the use of a phony bomb threat tweet to disrupt the flight of a Sony Executive as part of a protest against Sony's corporate behaviour.

Online political expression is evolving quickly, with new approaches emerging frequently and proliferating widely, if they work, or dying away when they don't.

The old view that people would get out on the street and protest if they were really unhappy is no longer supported by the evidence - and the notion that online activism is simply 'slacktivism' and doesn't represent significant numbers or strong views is equally no longer supportable.

Governments - both politically and administratively - need to build their understanding of modern approaches to political engagement and learn how to use and defuse them (as appropriate) to serve their own ends.

Otherwise there are real and growing risks that a government or public agency will be severely damaged or brought down through online political avenues - channels that they weren't effectively monitoring, didn't hold in high regard and catastrophically undervalued.

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Algorithm detected Ebola outbreak nine days before health authorities using internet posts

There's a great article over at TechRepublic by Lyndsey Gilpin on how the computer algorithm behind HealthMap detected the recent Ebola outbreak nine days before it was identified by health authorities.

In How an algorithm detected the Ebola outbreak a week early, and what it could do next, Gilpin describes how by tracking, collating and corroborating information published in online news sources and social media, the algorithm was able to identify the 'mystery hemorrhagic fever' over a week before official health agencies.

However the significance of the outbreak was not realised by HealthMap founders until after health authorities got involved.

This type of use of internet 'chatter' and algorithms to make sense of the world offers enormous potential for organisations to better identify and understand underlying trends.

For government this means the ability to identify outbreaks of human, animal and crop diseases earlier, detect early indications of potential crises and trends in population views and behaviours.

In all these cases it gives government the opportunity - using only public sources of information - to react sooner and more appropriately, containing problems and getting ahead of issues.

Equally this capability can be used by commercial entities for marketing and product development, by financial organisations for faster and better informed investment decisions and by activists, lobbyists, foreign interests and terrorists to identify weak points for destabilising a nation or gaining advantage.

It remains early days in this area - not as early as when Google first released its flu map for Australia back in 2009 - but early enough that few organisations are, as yet, investing in this area (giving them a huge advantage over rivals).

However with HealthMap's algorithms now successful at screening out over 90% of unrelated information, the value of using this type of approach in policy and service delivery has now reached the point of commercial viability, which should only accelerate investment and research into the area in coming years.

If Australian governments aren't yet mining the public internet for intelligence to help improve decision-making, hopefully it won't be long until they do - at least to contend against others who might use this intelligence for less than positive purposes.

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