After the Australian government decided to consider the introduction of website blocking, the local Pirate Party has launched a Senate petition to fight such measures, where they were describes as ineffective

The recent news revealed that after continuous pressure from Hollywood studios, the Australian government gave up and promised to consider the introduction of new anti-piracy mechanisms, including warning of the infringers and website blocking. The first one, better known as the graduated response system, can be seen in several countries, though no results from it were seen thus far. Website blocking is more controversial, because it is not even practiced in the United States.

Now the local Pirate Party claims that it will do everything to make sure that neither of these methods lands on Aussie soil, claiming that no evidence can prove that graduated response regimes are efficient. On the opposite, lots of studies and reviews on the matter are skeptical that they have any measurable impact on preventing piracy.

The Pirate Party claims that their petition is supposed to remind the country’s Senate that it has some obligations as the House of Review. The paper submitted describes detailed reasons for opposition to online filtering and graduated response system – for example, that they just won’t work. The petition also asks the Senate to reject any bills introducing either a graduated response scheme or site blocking.

Actually, the Pirate Party’s stance is backed up with numerous researches. For example, a recent paper published by American and French researchers proves that “three-strikes” regimes did nothing to reduce file-sharing and prevent rampant piracy. In the beginning of 2014, the Court of The Hague also ruled that the website blockade previously ordered against the largest torrent tracker in the world, The Pirate Bay, was both disproportionate and ineffective.

Unfortunately, many agree that the Australians are being treated as second-class people when it comes to availability and reasonable pricing of entertaining content. Solving this problem can help solve the piracy conundrum. It is not fair that geographical market segmentation forces Australians to pay more for digital content. In fact, despite being called “the world’s worst pirates”, the Australians are paying significantly more than everyone else.

Source: torrentfreak.com