Delimiter » piracy

Senate blocks release of secret piracy docs

Renai LeMay — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:49:06 +0000

news The Federal Government and Opposition have teamed up to block a motion put by the Greens in the Senate which would have forced the Attorney-General’s Department to produce a series of documents regarding its closed-door meetings on Internet piracy in February this year.

On 8 February this year, major Australian ISPs sat down with the representatives of the film, television and music industries and the Federal Attorney-General’s Department, with the aim of discussing a potential industry resolution to the issue of online copyright infringement. The meeting was the fourth such meeting to be held, after a series of other meetings were held late last year under similar circumstances.

However, the Attorney-General’s Department has used a series of complex legal arguments to deny the release of documents associated with the meetings under Freedom of Information laws — redacting, for example, an entire 14 pages of notes taken by a departmental staffer at the event and other four pages of notes taken by a senior staffer from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s department.

Subsequently to the censorship of the FoI request, Greens Senator and Communications Spokesperon Scott Ludlam filed a motion in the Senate in March requesting that the Attorney-General’s Department produce a list of invitees and attendees at the February meeting, notes and minutes arising from the meeting, any documentation issued to attendees and any internal departmental correspondence regarding the meeting — as well as documents relating to future meetings.

However, the motion came to fruition on Wednesday this week, it was blocked overwhelmingly in the Senate, with both the Government and Opposition declining to support it. In the Senate, Ludlam noted for the record that the Greens supported the proposal, while “the rest of the chamber opposed it”. The Coalition did not take the chance to hold the Government accountable on the matter. In the past, Shadow Attorney-General George Brandis and Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull have not responded to requests to comment on the issue.

The news is now the third time which attempts to retrieve information regarding the secret piracy talks have failed.

In April, the Federal Attorney-General’s Department conducted an internal review of the decision by its Freedom of Information officers not to release the sensitive documents. At the time, a senior office of the department found that its decision to substantially block the Freedom of Information request was valid.

“I have decided that disclosure of these documents would be contrary to the public interest,” the department’s director of its FOI and Privacy Section, Malcolm Bennett said at the time in one argument made. “My reasons for so concluding are essentially the same as [AGD senior legal officer Jane Purcell]‘s— that is, that the discussions that are taking place are at a delicate and sensitive stage.”

The talks have gained an extra level of potency following a High Court decision in mid-April which found that major ISP iiNet was not responsible for the Internet piracy actions of its users. At the time, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, which represents film and TV studios, said the loss illustrated that the Government needed to step in and take action on the issue of Internet piracy.

In response, Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon said the Government would closely examine the case, but added that the closed-door meetings between the content and ISP industries on the matter would continue. Despite this statement, it is believed that no further formal meetings have been held or scheduled by the Attorney-General’s Department on the issue since February.

The Australian newspaper has reported that ISPs have taken a stronger stance against copyright holders in dealing with the Attorney-General’s Department since the High Court decision. However, it also reported that a second set of informal meetings between a smaller group of industry stakeholders had also been held by the Attorney-General’s Department on the issue.

opinion/analysis
I really don’t understand the Opposition. This is a political group which will rail against the Government at every opportunity — on asylum seekers, on the National Broadband Network, on the carbon tax — the negative vitriol is incredible. And yet, when given a concrete chance to hold the Government of the day accountable on an issue of high public interest such as Internet piracy, the Opposition doesn’t take it.

All it would have taken for the Opposition to hold the Government accountable on this issue would have been for it to vote for the Greens’ motion to produce these secret documents. Instead, the Opposition chose to support the Government in keeping information in the public interest from being made public. Incredible.

As for Shadow Attorney-General George Brandis … do your job, George; realise that there has been public interest in this important issue for six months now, that it’s been covered in several national media outlets, and that the Labor Government is both holding secret meetings with industry and trying to stop that information from coming to the public eye. Keeping the Government accountable on this issue serves both the Coalition’s political interests as well as the public interest. Can’t you see your way clear to getting out of bed for this kind of free win?

Greens demand Australia cancel ACTA participation

Renai LeMay — Tue, 08 May 2012 01:29:35 +0000

news The Greens have demanded that Australia’s Government cancel its participation in the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement international treaty in the wake of an expected imminent rejection of the proposal by the European Union and significant and ongoing global protests against a number of its terms expected to harm Internet freedom.

ACTA is a multinational treaty which aims to establish international standards for the enforcement of intellectual property rights, including setting a framework to tackle counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement. It was signed last year by a number of large first-world countries such as Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore and the United States.

However, the general public has been excluded in many countries from the process of negotiating the treaty, and critics have slammed it, noting it could potentially affect digital rights, freedom of expression and privacy. Late last week, European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes said that ACTA was unlikely to come into effect in Europe, despite the fact that most of the 27 EU states have signed the treaty. The Verge has reported that ACTA is currently being investigated by the European Court of Justice over concerns that its privacy provisions could breach European law.

In Australia yesterday, Greens Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam, who has been a strident critic of ACTA, participated in a fraught exchange in a hearing about the treaty (transcription in PDF here) with officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Attorney-General’s Department, which have been overseeing Australia’s participation in ACTA.

Ludlam told the bureaucrats that the Joint Committee on Treaties, which he sits on, had taken a substantial weight of evidence, “much of it pretty damning”, from experts in intellectual property.
“A lot of that evidence has been strongly negative,” he said. “I have lost track of the exact number of times we have been told that this thing is broken — it cannot be fixed, it cannot be amended, and it needs to be rejected in its entirety. Presuming you have had the time to review that evidence, has any of the evidence that has been put to this committee by experts in this field giving you cause to maybe pause and reconsider some of the things that we are signing up to?”

In a separate statement ahead of the committee hearing yesterday, Ludlam said the “ACTA bandwagon has crashed” and it was “time for Australia to get off”. “I am hoping [DFAT] will take a second look, and conduct a proper analysis on the threats to privacy, cheaper medicine and our economic interests posed by this Agreement,” he added. “If we can persuade the Government to at least conduct a proper National Interest Test that will be a good start.”

“In the meantime, this proposed Agreement is getting a bucketing in Europe and will probably never see the light of day, and here in Australia the Committee has taken compelling evidence from a range of experts that sharply contrast with the Australian Government’s uncritical and utopian position on copyright enforcement.

However, in the committee hearings this week, government officials supported Australia’s participation in ACTA, and denied the treaty would have a negative impact on IP law or Internet freedom in Australia. George Mina, an assistant secretary with DFAT, said he understood the European concerns around ACTA, but said Australia’s legal environment wouldn’t be affected by the treaty.

“I think it is fair to say that many of the concerns that we have seen on the street in German cities in recent weeks and the last couple of months pertain to internet freedom questions,” he told the committee. “You have seen a large number of young people very concerned about the potential impact on internet freedom questions. There is no doubt about that.”

“I have addressed some of those questions before and I can do so briefly again and just make the point that nothing in ACTA impacts on internet freedom in Australia. Our laws comfortably meet the requirements set out by ACTA in respect to the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the digital environment. So absolutely nothing will change in respect to internet freedom.

“I can say, without maligning the views of those who choose to protest, in respect of the Australian jurisdiction there has been some misunderstanding about the impact of ACTA on internet freedom. There is absolutely no doubt about that. I have spoken very directly to many of the people who are making some of these claims and tried to take them through the text .. There will be no change. So there will not be an impact on internet freedom whatsoever in Australia.”

Mina said that in general, Australia’s regime for IP protection and enforcement reflected a “balance” between the objectives of creating and distributing knowledge and the rights of producers on one hand, and the legitimate interests of users of IP on the other hand. He said that during the ACTA negotiations, there was “significant pressure” from other negotiating partners to “alter that balance in certain respects”.

“We can attest to the fact that Australian negotiators fought hard in the negotiations in order to protect the balance inherent in our law,” Mina added. “We were ultimately successful in doing so. We were of course also successful in ensuring that same balance was reflected in the emerging international standard. We were very pleased that we were able to achieve this result for Australia. There will therefore be no regulatory change whatsoever in Australia as a result of ACTA.”

However, others didn’t appear so sure that ACTA would have no impact on Australian law. Specialist IP lawyer and academic Luigi Palombi told the committee hearing yesterday that ACTA was “a terrible document” that laid the framework for future changes.

“The legislation may not necessarily come directly through ACTA,” he said. “It may come through subsequent agreements—for example, the trans-Pacific partnership agreement that is currently being negotiated. ACTA is more like a vehicle for change—it creates the environment for change—but the changes may come through other agreements. This is the real problem with ACTA. That is why I say that you cannot look at ACTA in isolation from what already exists in terms of Australia’s international obligations in relation to intellectual property and those that are currently being negotiated or those that may come in the future.”

“To read ACTA in isolation to the plethora of other international agreements such as TRIPS, the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement and the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement also being negotiated in secret talks is to misunderstand the role which ACTA will play in a carefully crafted strategy designed to take more and more of the public domain out of the hands of the Australian people and deliver it into the hands of those who have the money to persuade unsuspecting bureaucrats that they are entitled to claim products of nature as their own inventions.”

Ludlam didn’t appear to believe the committee hearing this week had been very productive. “ACTA hearing has been like banging my head on a polite and respectful piece of concrete,” he said on Twitter yesterday “… that was a particularly bad example of denial dressed up as dialogue.”

opinion/analysis
At the moment I think many Australians are unsure as to why the ACTA treaty has attracted so much criticism in Europe. For those are uncertain about this, I encourage you to read the following article by David Meyer, which was published in the Guardian in February. Perhaps the following paragraphs will give you some indication as to why digital rights activists are so upset about this treaty:

“The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is, despite its name, effectively an international treaty that forces signatories to criminalise “commercial-scale” copyright and trademark infringement … ACTA criminalises activities such as breaking the digital locks on rights-protected files, or even distributing tools to help people do so. Stripping the artist information from a music file becomes a crime, as does decrypting content that has been scrambled for copyright protection. ACTA also codifies the flawed idea, in calculating damages from so-called piracy, that every unlawful download represents a lost sale.

ACTA ostensibly targets big players, but, when it comes to its application on the internet, its definition of “commercial-scale” infringement is loose enough to also cause trouble for individuals.”

In Australia, it seems relatively clear at this point that no Australian law needs to be changed for the nation to ratify ACTA, with our existing IP law already covering much of what the treaty discusses. And that IP law appears to have worked quite well for the nation over the past decade, in my opinion, in achieving the ‘balance’ that DFAT assistant secretary George Mina described. In addition, the Greens have so far not been successful in uncovering a so-called ‘smoking gun’ provision in ACTA that would have dramatic implications in Australia beyond our existing laws.

Some of Senator Ludlam’s questions to DFAT this week on ACTA appeared to go towards a potential ability for ACTA to constrain future IP policy development in Australia. But again, it seems as though the treaty isn’t likely to have a substantial impact on this area either.

It is likely for these reasons that there have so far been no widespread protests in Australia against ACTA, and why locally, apart from some degree of ill-feeling and suspicion from the Internet community, there hasn’t been a lot of controversy over the treaty.

My attitude towards ACTA in Australia right now is that we should be ‘alert but not alarmed’. The treaty, whilst it has some concerning provisions, doesn’t appear to be about to bring the Internet as we know it down around our ears, and in practice won’t change much of anything in terms of Australia’s regulatory environment around intellectual property. But we should still keep an eye on it. Who knows where this controversial initiative will go in future, and there’s always the potential for something much worse to be built on top of the foundation ACTA has laid.

Image credit: Lukas P, Creative Commons

Govt to continue secret anti-piracy talks

Renai LeMay — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:37:34 +0000

news The Federal Government would “closely examine” the High Court’s judgement in the long-running copyright infringement case won by ISP iiNet over film and TV studios this morning, Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon said this afternoon, as she noted that closed-door talks held by her department with industry on the matter would continue.

The High Court this morning knocked back a final appeal by the studios, represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft. The studios first took iiNet to court in 2009, claiming iiNet had “authorised” its users to download pirated movies and TV over the Internet. However, the court said today, iiNet had no ability to prevent its customers from infringing copyright, and copyright law was not suited to enforcing the laws of content owners through such platforms. Subsequently, AFACT said the loss illustrated that Australia’s Government needed to step in and take action on the issue of Internet piracy.

“The Government will examine the High Court’s decision closely,” said Roxon in a brief statement in response issued this afternoon.

The news comes as the Federal Attorney-General’s Department has over the past six months hosted a series of closed door meetings on the issue between ISPs like iiNet and rights-holder organisations such as AFACT, with industry groups such as the Communications Alliance also involved. Subsequent Attorneys-General (Roxon and her predecessor Robert McClelland) have emphasised their desire for an industry-led solution to the issue.

“Industry stakeholders have been meeting regularly during the last year to develop a code of conduct to address the issue of illegal downloading,” Roxon added this afternoon. “The Attorney-General’s Department will continue to facilitate these discussions and we hope that industry will continue to work together to find a range of solutions to illegal downloading.”

However, the meetings held by the Attorney-General’s Department have been less than transparent, and according to iiNet, have been going around in circles.

The Attorney-General’s Department has used a series of complex legal arguments to deny the release of documents associated with the meetings under Freedom of Information laws — redacting, for example, an entire 14 pages of notes taken by a departmental staffer at the event and other four pages of notes taken by a senior staffer from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s department. The moves have led to the Australian Greens filing a motion in the Senate requesting that the documents be released. In addition, representatives of consumer groups have been explicitly barred from attending the talks.

This afternoon, iiNet chief executive Michael Malone reportedly said his company might simply back away from the meetings altogether. “My preference would be to walk away now,” he said at a press conference, according to iTNews.

Another key telco involved in the talks, Telstra, this afternoon said in an emailed statement that it remained open to constructive discussions with rights holders, the industry, consumer groups and Government to seek a response to this issue that “appropriately balances the interests of all stakeholders”.

The sole organisation to publicly reveal any information about the talks has been iiNet. Recently, the ISP’s regulatory chief Steve Dalby posted comments on Delimiter stating that there was a “massive” gap in the talks between what the ISP and content industries wanted. “Most, if not all of the discussions over the years have been conducted between the rights holders and the ISPs,” he said. “These have been fruitless. The rights holders want all the benefits of remedial action, but want the ISPs to foot the bill. ISPs don’t want to pay to protect the rights of third parties. The gap between the parties is considerable and unlikely to close.”

Separately, a coalition of most of the nation’s major ISPs last year proposed a scheme for handling Internet piracy which would see Australians issued with warning and educational notices after content holders provided evidence that they had breached their copyright online — and the door opened for ISPs to hand over user details to the content industry if they keep on pirating content online. At the time, AFACT declined to comment on the issue, citing the need for the iiNet trial to go ahead.

Consumer input needed
Today another group associated with copyright issues, the Australian Digital Alliance, which primarily represents universities, libraries and some Internet-focused organisations such as Yahoo and Google, said it didn’t believe the battle between ISPs and the content sector was over yet, stating the High Court had “left open the possibility of a targeted legislative scheme to address unauthorised file sharing issues”.

However, the group’s chairman Derek Whitehead issued a warning that any legislative response to the High Court ruling must be carefully balanced and informed by the needs of consumers, as well as the content industries and ISPs.

“The Attorney-General’s Department has been working on an industry solution with the ISPs and content industries for some time. Consumers should be included in these discussions, because consumers, as end users of copyright material stand to be greatest affected by any legislative or industry outcome,” Whitehead said in a statement.

“The ADA encourages the Government to take wide consultation on this issue, and to ensure that consumer representatives are brought into the discussions,” the ADA statement said. “A fundamental issue to be taken into account in any legislative or industry response is the lack of legitimate content available to consumers in Australia. More needs to be done to make content available in an affordable and accessible way.”

The comments echo statements made in January by the Greens.

“What I find the most offensive about that, is that they locked the people out of the room that actually matter,” Greens Communications Spokesperson, Senator Ludlam said at the time. “All of the writers, the creative artists, the performance people, they’re not in there. The rights holders are in there. The end users, the consumers … us, are locked out of the room as well.”

Ludlam said it was the “intermediaries” who were discussing the issue under the auspices of the Attorney-General’s Department, who had been told to come up with something that was “not too offensive” for their corporate interests. “They’ve locked out the producers and consumers. The model which will be introduced in Australia, when we get to hear about it, will probably be stuffed and offensive,” he added.

Image credit: Timeshift9, Creative Commons

Defence worthy of a High Court victory? “Yes, Minister”

Renai LeMay — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 03:53:04 +0000

blog Given iiNet’s conclusive victory in its High Court defence against AFACT this morning, it seems an appropriate time to remind readers of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s opinion of the case, aired in March 2009. According to a ZDNet.com.au report at the time, Conroy said:

“I saw iiNet’s defence in court under oath; they have no idea if their customers are downloading illegally music or movies. Stunning defence, stunning defence … I thought a defence in terms of ‘we had no idea’ … belongs in a Yes Minister episode.”

Yes, Minister. Or maybe … no, Minister?

Image credit: kjd, Creative Commons

The online copyright war: the day the internet hit back at big media

The Guardian — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:13:57 +0000

This article titled “The online copyright war: the day the internet hit back at big media” was written by Dominic Rushe, for The Guardian on Wednesday 18th April 2012 17.03 UTC

A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that major media firms hate technology. They certainly fear it. Since Jack Valenti, the legendary film industry lobbyist, said in 1982 that the VCR was like the Boston Strangler, preparing to murder the innocents of Hollywood, they have viewed such advances as a Godzilla creature rising from the sea to threaten their existence.

In the past 30 years in the US, they have lobbied for 15 pieces of legislation aimed at tightening their grip on their content, as technology has moved ever faster to prise their fingers open.

In this seemingly never-ending battle, 18 January 2012 was a defining date, a day when the internet hit back. Mike Masnick, founder of TechDirt and one of Silicon Valley’s most well-connected bloggers, remembers running through the corridors of the Senate in Washington, laptop open, desperately trying to find a Wi-Fi signal.

Around him was chaos. Amid a cacophony of phones, political interns were struggling to keep up with the calls and emails from angry people across the US and the world claiming Hollywood-backed legislation was about to break the internet and end its open culture forever. In an unprecedented day of action, Wikipedia and Reddit, a social news website, had gone offline in a protest organised by their communities of editors, and backed by thousands of other sites, large and small. Google had blacked out its logo in protest. Students around the world were bitching on Twitter that they couldn’t get their homework done without Wikipedia. Even Kim Kardashian came out swinging.

One senator’s office that Masnick visited calculated they had taken 3,000 calls. Within hours of the unprecedented assault, Sopa, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was dead and a sister act, Pipa, a neat acronym for the tortuously titled Protect IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) was sunk too. In Europe, the action buoyed up opponents of Acta, the US-backed international copyright treaty that has sparked protests across the continent. Countries including Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia have all refused to sign, arguing that Acta endangers freedom of speech and privacy, and the bill has stalled. But for how long? “The industry has this down cold,” Masnick says. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Valenti’s old stomping ground and one of the most powerful lobbying bodies in Washington, has emerged bruised from the battle, but few doubt it will rally.

There is widespread anger among leading media companies about the way the Sopa fight played out. The protest had many voices but there was no doubting whom the media executives blamed – Silicon Valley in general and Google in particular. President Barack Obama had “thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters”, according to Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp empire includes the Fox studios. “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them,” Murdoch wrote on Twitter. “No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.”

But trying to blame Google or even to cast this as a battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is to misrepresent a major shift in the media landscape, say those pushing for a more open internet.

Elizabeth Stark, a free culture advocate who has been campaigning for a relaxation of copyright law for years, says the Sopa battle will be seen as a landmark in a much wider debate about the open nature of the internet compared with the closed, copyright-protected world from before the digital age.

“This wasn’t Google v Hollywood,” says Stark, a visiting fellow at the Yale Information Society Project. “This was 15 million internet users v Hollywood. That’s what they don’t get. I think they think we can just get a few executives and put them in a room and call those people ‘the internet’. Well, now they know that’s not going to work.” That said, Stark doubts that this battle is over. The losing side is rallying its troops. The media giant Viacom, owner of Paramount Pictures and Comedy Network, has reanimated a $1bn (£630m)suit against Google’s YouTube, which it accuses of allowing users to use its copyright material from shows such as South Park and The Colbert Report. No legislation in the US is likely before November’s election. But as Wikileaks showed, the US has already pushed for Sopa-style legislation in Spain and in the tech community, few doubt that Sopa will be revived.

After the act was shelved, Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents music labels, wrote a blistering article in the New York Times attacking Wikipedia and Google for spreading misinformation in order to cause a “digital tsunami” that “raised questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age”.

Sherman wrote: “The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular websites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power. When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.” Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales says the RIAA is missing the point. “They are irrelevant at this point. I don’t care what they have to say. Someone is so far out of touch with what is going on in Washington, with the public and with their own industry.”

For decades, the media industry has tightened its hold on copyright material. There are valid arguments for protecting the rights of content creators, but it is now clear that applying these rules to the digital age isn’t going to work – not least because those now affected by copyright rules are not just other companies but ordinary people. “The public think it’s gone too far,” said Wales. “It’s just possible that we may be at a point where we can stop the march forward of this ridiculousness.”

The internet has changed the world so much that current legislation is not adequate, said Wales. “Go back 50 years and copyright was an industrial regulation that most people had no contact with,” he said. “It was pretty difficult to find yourself in a position where you had committed a felony.” Now the US is trying to extradite Richard O’Dwyer, a 23-year-old UK-based computer science student, on copyright infringement charges. “When, 50 years ago, could a kid sitting in his basement in the UK commit a crime in the US? It’s disturbing.”

What are the legitimate limits to copyright? What’s the ethical norm for copying? “None of that is clear yet. It’s going to take time to work that out,” said Wales. Until 18 January, the debate within legislatures had been about extension and enforcement of the current rules. Now he hopes there may be time for a bigger debate. “We also need to bring back into discussion serious issues about the length of copyright, which has been extended again and again for no good purpose. We need to talk about what constitutes fair use, what kind of copying can the public do without getting into trouble.” If, for example, someone uploads a video of their child’s birthday party and then finds it has been deleted because a copyrighted song is playing in the background, “that’s not piracy. That’s how we use our music these days,” says Wales. “A lot of what people want to do now is not legal but should be legal. We can say that and still be against full-scale piracy.”

Wales said he had never heard of Megaupload, the online file sharing site at the centre of an international criminal investigation, before it was shut down, but had friends who used it. “It was people who lived outside the US who said they would have bought such and such but they don’t sell it here,” he says. “If there’s some great show that they are not showing over here, they are very tempted. We can morally disapprove, but that’s the way people are.” Megaupload was charging a subscription to people who wanted a lot of content. “Why should you pay these assholes money when you could pay the people who actually made it some money?” said Wales. If the media industry addressed the needs of its audience, there would be less piracy, he believes.

Stark points to a study by Musiksverige (Music Sweden), an industry association, that found music piracy in Sweden fell significantly after the introduction of Spotify, a streaming music service. “It shows what we have said all along: people want to reward artists for their work.”

Alexis Ohanian, Reddit’s co-founder, agrees. “I’m hopeful right now. These are not soundbite issues, they are complicated. If you look at the work that Reddit’s community did investigating Sopa, you can see that there is a lot of thought going into these issues in the community. Like a lot of rights, I think we took our right to a life online for granted until it was challenged. I think we are on guard now.”

Media execs are on guard too. Many look to the music industry and fear they may be next. Since the peer-to-peer filesharing site Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the US have dropped 53%, from $14.6bn to $6.9bn in 2010. The digital world is a lot less lucrative than selling DVDs.

Last year the movie industry made $30bn at the box office worldwide. Ed Epstein, author of The Hollywood Economist, calculates box office revenue accounts for just 10% of a hit movie’s money. The rest comes from cable and satellite channels, pay-per-view TV, video rentals, DVD sales and digital downloads. All that extra cash comes from sources that Hollywood once railed against, and pressed Washington to crack down on.

But this time Epstein believes the industry may be right to be worried.

As the music industry has shown, digital sales are worth a fraction of physical sales. There are already signs that the movie industry is changing.

There was a new player in town at the Sundance film festival this year, one who had financed 17 of the movies on show. That player was you. Kickstarter, a three-year-old website that hosts crowdsourced fundraising for creative projects, had funded 17 films at Sundance, about 10% of the total, and had another 33 films at the South by Southwest festival in March. The company is now a significant player in independent film, allowing cinematic hopefuls to take their case right to the people. It’s just the beginning of a major change in the industry, says Kickstarter’s co-founder Yancey Strickler.

“I think we are at a point where we are asking whether you really need a film industry for a film to be made or a music industry to make music. People can now speak directly to their audiences,” he said. “And the demands of an audience are very different to the demands of an industry. An industry wants to know about merchandising tie-ins with McDonalds – that’s not necessarily what the audience is looking for, or what the artist is concerned with.”

Strickler was at Sundance this year, where a number of Kickstarter-financed films were offered distribution deals. But many people were also rejecting deals they saw as disadvantageous.

“Going straight to the web, or video on demand, or doing a deal with independent cinemas – these are all viable options now,” said Strickler. “Look at the success of that Joseph Kony video. This is just the beginning.”

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Image credit: LoveNMoreLove, Creative Commons

ACCC approves FOXTEL and Austar merger

Chillibreeze — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:37:44 +0000

news The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has announced it will not oppose the proposed acquisition of AUSTAR by FOXTEL, greenlighting the multi-billion dollar merger of the two pay TV giants and paving the way for Australia’s digital TV sphere to be re-shaped.

In a media release issued yesterday, the ACCC announced that to aid with its approval, it would accept court-enforceable undertakings from FOXTEL, which will prevent FOXTEL from acquisition of exclusive Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) rights for popular programs and movie content.

ACCC had earlier announced that it had initiated a consultation on a proposed undertaking by pay TV giant FOXTEL regarding its proposed $1.9 billion acquisition of Austar, a major pay TV company. Following extensive market feedback and discussions with FOXTEL, the non-exclusivity provisions of the draft undertaking were broadened to address the likely harm to competition arising as a result of the acquisition.

The undertaking is for 8 years and includes more than 60 linear channels supplied by independent content suppliers, internationally broadcast channels including those currently not carried by FOXTEL, movie linear channels, Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) rights to current/past seasons of television programs and SVOD rights to movies. The merger highlights include:

Prohibits FOXTEL from acquiring exclusive rights for movies delivered on a Transactional Video on Demand (TVOD) basis.
Prohibits FOXTEL from acquiring exclusive mobile rights for content where rights are sought by competitors to combine with IPTV rights.
Prohibits FOXTEL from acquiring exclusive SVOD rights for a broad range of television programs and movie content, including Nickelodeon and National Geographic channels, and companion mobile rights to relevant IPTV content.
Aims to lower barriers by requiring FOXTEL to provide necessary signal access to linear channels distributed by independent content suppliers.
Extends FOXTEL’s Special Access Undertaking which makes it possible for content suppliers to gain access to more than 2.2 million FOXTEL and Austar subscribers.
Does not prevent FOXTEL from acquiring exclusive rights in relation to individual sports, which is considered independent of the acquisition.

The main areas of concern with the proposed acquisition of the two major pay TV giants in Australia were in the national market for retail supply of subscription television services, especially related to IPTV, and in the regional markets for fixed broadband and telephony. The merger would have meant that Telstra, a major shareholder of FOXTEL, would be a superior player in fixed voice, broadband and IPTV services.

ACCC chairman Rod Sims said “By reducing content exclusivity, the undertakings will lower barriers to entry and promote new and effective competition in metropolitan and regional telecommunications and subscription television markets.” He added that the undertaking offered by FOXTEL is unlikely to substantially reduce competition.

As telecommunication networks develop, the ACCC expects that the undertaking will create more opportunities for competitors to develop differentiated and consumer-friendly subscription television offerings combining IPTV services with other telecommunication services. The undertaking however, does not prevent acquisition of exclusive rights to individual sports.

“The proposed undertaking has been offered by FOXTEL to address the harm to competition which is likely to arise as a result of the proposed acquisition,” Sims said. “However it is not intended to resolve competition or structural issues that may already exist in the relevant markets and are unrelated to the proposed acquisition.”

Sims added that the ACCC will remain conscious in regard to competition concerns and misuse of market power, and whether there is a need to advocate for regulatory intervention in existing and emerging media markets.

The move was immediately welcomed by FOXTEL part-owner Telstra. Rick Ellis, Group Managing Director Telstra Digital Media, said the decision was a win for consumers:

“The merger between FOXTEL and AUSTAR will create a pay TV company that will be able to provide innovative content for customers across Australia,” he said. “It will also enable Telstra to expand its FOXTEL on T-Box offering into some AUSTAR areas over time, enabling regional Australians in those areas to enjoy the same high quality IPTV services as those who live in metropolitan areas. Telstra will provide further detail on its plans to expand the availability of FOXTEL on T-Box at a later date.”

However, not everyone is happy about the ACCC’s decision on the matter.

Greens communications spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam said the ACCC should have delayed its decision in light of the allegations of commercial piracy levelled by the Financial Review newspaper against News Corp subsidiary NDS. Foxtel is part-owned by News.

“The competition impacts of the takeover were troubling enough, and were made infinitely more troubling by the piracy allegations,” said Ludlam in a statement. “This takeover will exacerbate the one-way trend towards monopoly in Australia’s pay-TV sector, and the ACCC should have put any decision on hold until these serious allegations against News Corp entities are resolved.”

“I wrote to the ACCC on March 28th to request a hold on the decision and asked that the ACCC review all relevant material pertaining to the allegations of commercial piracy by News Corp against rival subscription television vendors before coming to a conclusion on the proposed $1.9billion takeover. On that same day it was revealed that the Australian Federal Police are assisting
UK police investigating the News Corporation phone hacking scandal. Regardless of the court-enforceable undertakings from FOXTEL designed to limit the acquisition’s negative impacts on competition, the gravity of the pay-TV piracy allegations should have put the decision on hold until they are resolved.”

In addition, Telstra’s telco rivals Optus and iiNet have also publicly repeated their concerns about the merger.

opinion/analysis
To be honest, as a technology industry commentator the merger of FOXTEL and AUSTAR doesn’t bother me too much. In the long-term, content is becoming disaggregated from the platforms which it was previously bound to, and I don’t expect the merger of two pay TV rivals without much of a common geographical footprint to tie up the market too much. The emergence of Apple’s iTunes platform as a video distribution system, coupled with IPTV initiatives delivered over broadband (especially as the National Broadband Network is rolled out) should solve much of these market competition issues over the next few years. God knows, most Australians of my generation (Generation Y) don’t really care about FOXTEL at all. Very few of my friends are subscribers.

Image credit: MJimages, royalty free. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

Mass BitTorrent lawsuits return to the UK

External Contributor — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 06:57:14 +0000

This article was first published on file-sharing news site TorrentFreak under a Creative Commons licence and is re-published here with TorrentFreak’s permission. It was written by TorrentFreak writer Ben Jones.

news Speculative invoicing might be returning to the UK, thanks to a High Court judgment Monday. The practice, all but abandoned in the UK in the wake of the ACS:Law fiasco, has restarted but with conditions. Meanwhile, over 9,000 people could get letters from the plaintiff, Ben Dover.

Speculative invoicing – the practice of claiming people pirated files on BitTorrent, listing hundreds or thousands of people in one case to get details, then harassing them outside the courts for payment – was thought to be dead in the UK, after ACS:law collapsed last year. The solicitor at the center of that lawfirm, Andrew Crossley, was both fined and suspended from practicing law, which seemed to put a hold on similar cases.

However, it didn’t dissuade everyone. Yesterday, the UK’s High Court approved a case involving UK pornographer Ben Dover (real name Stephen James Honey) and his company Golden Eye International. Now, ISP O2 will have to release the details of up to 9000+ subscribers listed in the document for Dover and Golden Eye. The precise number is unclear, as other companies that attempted to send letters through Golden Eye were denied the opportunity.

It’s success at last for the pornographer, as he’s had several similar cases thrown out in the past including a partnership with 170-year-old law firm Tilly Baily Irvine which ended in sanctions last year.

This claim process started 6 months ago, and with O2 stating they would not contest the case. Chief Master Weingarten, in response, suggested that Consumer Focus (a government funded body looking after consumer rights) represent the IP addresses – the intended defendants – in court instead, a role Consumer Focus accepted.

Despite a strong defense, including pointing out all the issues with these kinds of actions, Weingarten approved the order, but with conditions. In perhaps a first for this sort of litigation, the court will be supervising the content of letters sent out to the alleged infringers, partly because of the ACS:law debacle.

In particular, the one-sided nature of the letters – only indicating the consequences should the alleged infringer lose – was not deemed appropriate, being indicative of bullying. Instead consequences should they successfully defend themselves should also be included.

Yet the most important part of the ruling is near the end, and might stop this practice once and for all; blanket fees to “make it all go away” are not acceptable.

137. Fifthly, I think that Mr Becker’s response in his second witness statement to the point made by counsel for Consumer Focus referred to in sub-paragraph 60(v) above is telling:

“… it assumes that £700 will be successfully obtained from each of the 9000, when that is plainly wrong. In fact, it is likely that only a small proportion will result in a successfully obtained payment of any sum.”

This comes quite close to an admission that the figure of £700 has been selected so as to maximise the revenue obtained from the letters of claim, rather than as a realistic estimate of the damages recoverable by the relevant Claimant from each Intended Defendant. In any event, that is the inference I draw in the light of the matters discussed above and in the absence of any disclosure of the information referred to in paragraph 88 above.

138. Accordingly, I do not consider that the Claimants are justified in sending letters of claim to every Intended Defendant demanding the payment of £700. What the Claimants ought to do is to proceed in the conventional manner, that is to say, to require the Intended Defendants who do not dispute liability to disclose such information as they are able to provide as to the extent to which they have engaged in P2P filesharing of the relevant Claimants’ copyright works. In my view it would be acceptable for the Claimants to indicate that they are prepared to accept a lump sum in settlement of their claims, including the request for disclosure, but not to specify a figure in the initial letter. The settlement sum should be individually negotiated with each Intended Defendant.

No more fee demands. Instead they can only state that they will accept a lump sum payment as settlement, to be negotiated if the accused accept liability. Otherwise, it will be down to the courts. It also seems that after many cases, Chief Master Weingarten has understood that these cases are about profits, not protecting rights. Very little money and a lot of grief was the prediction we highlighted earlier this month, and that seems to be the case.

Meanwhile, up to 9124 households are going to get a letter through their door talking about the porn they’ve allegedly downloaded. Let’s just hope that the tracking software, claimed to be ‘forensically accurate’ (huh?) does better than in times past, or there’s going to be a lot of needlessly embarrassed families, and unnecessary family strife when the postman calls.

Think The Pirate Bay will put its servers on drones? Dream on

The Guardian — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 01:05:33 +0000

This article titled “Think The Pirate Bay will put its servers on drones? Dream on” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 20th March 2012 14.30 UTC

Feeling credulous? Step right up to The Pirate Bay’s latest blogpost, then, and read on:

We were down a few hours earlier today. There’s no need to worry, we haven’t been raided this time. We’re only upgrading stuff since we’re still growing.

One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We’re just starting so we haven’t figured everything out yet. But we can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.

(There’s a bit more, but we don’t want to deter anyone from clicking through.)

Link me up

OK, so let’s see if we can find any holes in this idea. Because obviously we’d like nothing but the most resilient system for TPB.

“we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air”

Hmm. Onboard computer with uplink and downlink. That will have to be pretty precisely aligned to a ground transponder, unless it’s going to be broadcasting to the world at large. Except if it’s going to broadcast to the world at large, BSkyB-style, then it would need to be pretty large. So really it would need to connect to a ground terminal. On the ground, obviously. (If you need a quick explanation of how satellite internet – which this basically is – works, then see this page from How Stuff Works.)

So there’s your first point of weakness in this plan: you need to have some connections on the ground. Quite expensive satellite ones, actually, unless you happen to have people hanging around who are good at setting up high-speed wide-bandwidth connections for nothing. TPB is quite popular, even though it isn’t actually hosting anything much now because of its shift to “magnet” files rather than torrents.

Now, it’s quite easy to hide your ground-based uplink sites if your satellite – sorry, drone (we’ll come to that) is only connecting to a ground uplink/downlink. You can have them on the roof of a building, and just connect to them; if the beam from the satellite is tight, then it won’t leak appreciably and you’ll be happy. But if you need a tight connection, then you can’t float your satellite connection from a balloon – it’ll get blown around too much. Hence the drone.

Probably not going to fly

OK, let’s deal with the drone stuff now.

“we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air”

No, you’re probably not. Civil aviation authorities tend to get itchy about objects floating around in airspace at the sort of altitudes – a few kilometres up – where civil aircraft might whack into them. If your flying objects are going to be airborne for any length of time (which TPB implies here) then you need to tell the aviation authority, because causing a calamity in which an aircraft has to take avoiding action (or, even worse, crash-lands) is the sort of thing that easily leads to prison sentences. (There’s no point for TPB having a drone that isn’t miles up in the sky; it can’t connect enough points to act as a useful server.)

But even if we accept the idea that TPB will put some drones up, there are still two more problems: duration, and connection.

Duration first. UAV (Uncrewed Airborne Vehicles) are a relatively new technology, and they face the problem that anything which wants to fly does: how to stay up there. Even the US Army, which has been putting lots of money into UAVs, can’t keep them up there indefinitely. The Wikipedia page on UAVs suggests that the best that any known device has managed is around 14 days – although more typically they manage two days or less. While a Raspberry Pi is a very light payload, it still has some weight, and don’t forget that you’re also looking at your uplink/downlink systems and the associated demand on the batteries to run those. Likely, the drones are going to have to come out of the air every few days or so, which means recharging while a replacement is flying, and all the associated maintenance.

And then there’s the question of connection. If we assume for the minute that the TPB drones are going to be using a narrow-beam for uplink/downlink (so that their ground stations don’t become the target of businesses which don’t like their business) then the drone is going to have to be able to maintain a very, very precise location despite being a few kilometres up. That’s quite difficult, though not impossible; it just means that you need to have excellent electronics and very good position control, which in turn means more energy spent maintaining position. Yes, the US Army manages this just fine, but it has a slightly bigger budget than TPB.

Finally, the other question is: what’s the point of doing all this again? If TPB really wanted to have its servers out of the visibility of governments, then it could simply get them hosted via Cloudflare, which has become the host of choice for both big companies and small hackers. If its ground-based servers are too unreliable, why does it think that putting them a few kilometres up, where the temperature will be below the standard operating temperature for the kit, is going to improve things?

That hasn’t stopped an excited tide of commenters delighted at the idea on TPB, despite not having thought through quite how it would or would not work. Well, apart from one who only identifies himself as “dom9360″:

You (the audience) are either stupid or gullible. This will not happen anytime soon in a usable state. And, if it does, where do you think the non-wired drone communicates back to? Not only the directions but the actual shit found on here. The Internet is primarily a wired infrastructure. Some entity that is ground based will need to be tapped. So, how is this adding any benefit to the current situation? One does not need to disable the drone; rather, all that is needed is to disable the provider at ground. Looks like April came early.

Have to say that we agree. It’s not a workable plan within the budget or technology of TPB, and won’t be for a very long time – and there will be better systems long before that. (Even using Magnet files is a better solution on its own.) We’re only guessing, but we think that sound you hear from TPB might be sniggering.

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Pirate Party slams extreme govt secrecy

Asha Jacob, Chillibreeze — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:06:02 +0000

news Pirate Party Australia has condemned the actions of Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, whose department has refused to release documents regarding closed door discussions on the issue of Internet copyright infringement under Freedom of Information laws.

Pirate Party Australia is a group of like-minded individuals with its origins in similar parties in Europe who advocate the citizens’ right to freedom of information and culture, civil and digital liberties, and governmental transparency. In Europe the parties have been successful in the electoral process.

In a media release issued this week, the Party stated that Government continual secrecy and outright refusal of public sector institutions to release documents was a serious threat to Australian democracy, and must be curbed immediately. It reiterated that all government negotiations – whether with industry or foreign governments – must be transparent, accountable and available to the Australian public. The media release went on to say that when governments hide negotiations that take place with vested interests, from the public, it is likely that these vested interests would get what they want, regardless of the wishes of the people the government is meant to serve.

This was made amply clear, according to the party, this month when Roxon’s department withheld details of the fourth closed-door meeting between it and industry regarding Internet content piracy. The Federal Government had late last year similarly refused to reveal much information about another secret industry meeting (in total there have been four over the past six months) held last year to tackle the issue of Internet piracy.

The Attorney-General’s Department provided a series of five documents in response to a request for information about this meeting to be released under Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. The documents included 14 pages of notes taken by a departmental staffer at the event and four other pages of notes taken by a senior staffer from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s department. The information contained in these documents was clearly redacted. Delimiter is appealing the decision to block the release of the documents.

In a related development, the Australian Greens Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam filed an order in the Senate seeking the Government’s disclosure of details of the most recent meeting on Internet piracy which the Attorney-General’s Department has blocked from being released under FOI laws. Ludlam stated that it was industry “intermediaries” who were discussing the issue of anti-piracy with the Attorney-General’s Department and they have been asked to come up with something that was “not too offensive” for their corporate interests.

In this context, the Pirate Party also drew attention to the hazy Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) negotiations, where only leaked documents were available for public inspection and no official drafts were made public.

The Party feels that the recent change of Attorney-General has not improved the situation. Roxon succeeded Robert McClelland, who was removed from the position in a cabinet reshuffle late last year. According to the party, the new Attorney-General continues to follow the same pattern of her predecessor in maintaining government secrecy and what the Party calls the ‘top secret’ stamp to hide incompetence and dishonesty, setting a dangerous precedent for further misuse.

Brendan Molloy, Pirate Party Secretary opines: “The way the Attorney-General’s department is treating Australians is an affront to democracy. Hosting secret industry talks and withholding documents that are decades old are not the hallmark of a fair, representative and transparent democracy.” He called upon the Attorney-General to change her course and release the requested information in the public interest.

The Pirate Party also slammed Roxon for refusing to release documents regarding mass starvation in East Timor, despite the fact that the documents are up to 37 years old. According to the Party, the East Timor starvation documents could “reveal Australian complicity in concealing the mass starvation of 100,000 East Timorese.” The Party accused the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of influencing Roxon’s refusal to release these documents into the public domain, claiming that it would harm national interest. Pirate Party believes that any adverse impact of these documents on ties between Australia and Indonesia would be minimal; a fact endorsed by former Army intelligence officer Clinton Fernandes.

opinion/analysis
While the Pirate Party’s views are a little extreme at times, in this case it’s hard to argue that they’re not completely mainstream. I believe most Australians are in favour of as much government transparency as possible. The Government, after all, is ultimately responsible to residents of Australia. Transparency is essential to the process of democracy. If the Government decides not to release important documents — particularly historical ones — it had better have a pretty good reason why.

Image credits: Paul Brunskill, royalty free. Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay

Senate order: Greens demand secret piracy docs

Renai LeMay — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:19:26 +0000

news The Australian Greens have filed a motion in the Senate requesting that the Government release documents regarding its closed door meetings on Internet piracy which the Attorney-General’s Department has blocked from being released under Freedom of Information laws.

The Attorney-General’s Department stated in its response to a FoI request that it “does not hold” a list of the attendees who actually attended the February meeting. Furthermore, the department censored the names of the individuals invited to attend the meeting. It also completely redacted a document consisting of the agenda of the meeting, which had been distributed to those invited to attend. Delimiter is appealing portions of the blocked FoI request.

This morning, Greens Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam filed an order in the Senate that the Government disclose details of the most recent meeting. “The Government refuses to reveal almost any information about the attendees, the substance or the outcomes of the meeting,” he said in a separate statement. “A Freedom of Information request from a journalist looks like it’s been met with maximum resistance.”

“Major ISPs and representatives of the film, television and music industries have held a series of meetings with the Attorney-General’s Department to discuss an industry fix to the issue of online copyright infringement. This would be fine if everyone was at the table. But for some reason, former Attorney General McClelland decided to lock out the people that actually matter – the people who produce, and the people who purchase and use, the content.

Previous documents released under FoI laws have shown that the Attorney-General’s Department actively blocked representatives of consumer groups from attending the meetings.
“Even with the best will in the world, simply inviting the intermediaries to come up with something that suits their collective commercial interests is hardly an encouraging recipe for looking after the public interest,” said Ludlam. “I acknowledge that ISPs have done their best to prevent predatory behaviour by rights holders in the past, but there’s no substitute for a diversity of views in a forum such as this.”

“New Attorney General Roxon has inherited this situation from the former AG, and I call on her to table this material in an act of good faith and open the doors of these meetings so that the public can get a sense of what’s being cooked up.”

Senator Ludlam’s order for the production of documents asks that lists of invitees and attendees, notes and minutes arising from the meeting, any documentation issued to attendees, departmental correspondence regarding the meeting and any documents relating to future meetings be tabled in the Senate, on Thursday 22 March.

The sole organisation to publicly reveal any information about the talks is iiNet, which has attended the talks. Yesterday, the ISP’s regulatory chief Steve Dalby posted comments on Delimiter stating that there was a “massive” gap in the talks between what the ISP and content industries wanted. “Most, if not all of the discussions over the years have been conducted between the rights holders and the ISPs,” he said. “These have been fruitless. The rights holders want all the benefits of remedial action, but want the ISPs to foot the bill. ISPs don’t want to pay to protect the rights of third parties. The gap between the parties is considerable and unlikely to close.”

“Government probably wishes the whole thing would go away, but given that it hasn’t, they have reluctantly joined in the conversation, to see if a commercial solution could be encouraged.”

It’s not the first time Ludlam has criticised the Government over the issue. In late January the Senator said the various parties had been “locked in a room by a former Attorney-General and told to sort something out” — asked to resolve the question of how content creators could make money in a world where file sharing through platforms such as BitTorrent was popular.

“What I find the most offensive about that, is that they locked the people out of the room that actually matter,” Ludlam said at the time. “All of the writers, the creative artists, the performance people, they’re not in there. The rights holders are in there. The end users, the consumers … us, are locked out of the room as well.” Ludlam said it was the “intermediaries” who were discussing the issue under the auspices of the Attorney-General’s Department, who had been told to come up with something that was “not too offensive” for their corporate interests. “They’ve locked out the producers and consumers. The model which will be introduced in Australia, when we get to hear about it, will probably be stuffed and offensive,” he added.

Delimiter is seeking to contact the office of the Attorney-General for a response to Greens’ Senate move.

Update: Delimiter has received news from Scott Ludlam’s office that the vote on the motion for the production of documents has been held over until tomorrow (Thursday).

Image credit: David Howe, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence