Australia just passed into law one of the world’s most censoring copyright law,
which allows the country’s media giants like Village Roadshow to use
one-sided administrative process to get court orders to censor any
website whose “primary effect” is infringement, then use those orders to
force search engines to delist any site so blocked, and then recycle
those orders to block for any site or service that “provides access” to a
blocked site or service.
In other words, Village Roadshow can now censor any site it doesn’t
like, without the site’s operators being present to argue their side,
and then block search engines from displaying that site’s contents,
making it virtually impossible for everyday Australians to learn that
the site has been blocked – and they get to block tools like VPNs that
might allow people to get outside this censoring national firewall that
they get to run.
The pricetag for this is a secret: thought Village Roadshow gave AUD1.2
million to pass the precursor to this bill, Village Roadshow refuses to
say how much it spent in this cycle, and Australia’s backwards
election-spending transparency rules mean we won’t find out for months,
after this has faded from the news cycle (prior to this bill, Village
Roadshow’s all-time lobbying spend topped AUD6.7 million).
