Duncan Riley explains in detail how the whole study is flawed in great detail here. The government report has all the hallmarks of the justifications for going to war in Iraq. Especially the part where they say that the trial was a 100% success except for handling high traffic (especially video streaming) sites.

WTF???!!! I mean apart from those evil evil pirates who use bittorrent a lot of the traffic will be to youtube. And this brings me to the title of the post – the three douchbags.

Due to how Testra set up their filter, and I am using Telstra as an example here, if there is just one page on a site that is blocked, the whole site goes through a proxy. So it takes one douchebag to upload something potentially objectionable up on youtube, second douchebag to object to it and a third douchebag to place that page on a blocked list and to grind youtube to a halt for everyone.

Knowing the very vocal conservatives in this country the video in question will probably be some documentary about abortion with a half a second still shot of a bloody foetus which is perfectly fine by youtube standards and even by most broadcasting standards. Once the site is on a black list I seriously doubt an ISP can proxy all their youtube traffic through a single proxy. Not without spending quite a bit on their proxy farm anyway.

Imagine the outrage. All the school kids coming home will have to wait 10 minutes for the video of a dog driving a race kart. Guess what’s going to happen. They will go into very very slimy corners of the internets to find out how to circumvent the filter. God knows what else they are going to find there. Heck even the older people who can vote will not take too kindly to having their internet slowed down.

It’s not going to fly. I can just see wikileaks ending up on a blocked list, along with a thousand of “what’s blocked” sites set up by pundits that will pop up in the near future. It will be continual bad press for the government. I am going to vote for the Pirate Party.

I download because I don’t have to pay for it. Simple as that. And no matter how much anti-anti-filesharing people bang on about studies about people who download also buy more stuff I don’t believe it. I simply don’t believe that I am in the minority. In fact I don’t personally know a single person that says that they buy the DVD when it’s available. As far as I am concerned it’s a forum rhetoric.

Many people support iinet in the whole ii vs. AFUCT ordeal because they want to be able to download stuff for free. Except they’d say it’s because of privacy concerns, ISPs shouldn’t be judge, jury and the executioner etc. They are still in denial.

Whilst I admittedly am infringing that does not make my support for iiNet less valid. I think iiNet have good a good chance at defending themselves from all the accusations because I believe that entertainment industry should not bully their way around protecting their failing business models. I believe my moral compass is about on par with most people, so that is an indication of us being right and them being wrong.

Technically I think that any ISP can stop or at least slow down a game changing percentage of “illegal” downloads to the point where downloading becomes a domain of super-geeks. In demanding something like that the movie studios are not THAT unreasonable. It can be done. That still doesn’t mean it should be done.

The industry is where it is now because of people’s creativity and technology that enables it. The technology changed but people will always be creative. It may kill entertainment industry (highly unlikely though) but it will not kill entertainment. If if it does, so be it. They are a bunch of pricks anyway.

I spent $80 on internet ($30 of which is phone, which I wouldn’t spend if i didn’t need to have a phone line). This is how much I am willing to spend on my entertainment. I download mainly shows and barely ever watch a movie. This is my budget. If there was a service out there that would give me the ability to check emails and watch a half a dozen episodes a week I’d get it. $3 per episode on iTunes??? Come on, you gotta be joking. I would also pay for a device/service that gives me one click easy access to anything I want. Without stupid time or region windows.

If I was Jason Calacanis and I had my own podcast I would say: “Dear TV/movie industry executive donkeys. Please stop treating us like stupid people. Internet has been around for decades now. Region windows do not make sense. Start doing things that make sense and give us a good way of accessing the content. Please someone clip this and put it up on YouTube.”

So when I say that I want to get stuff for free I actually am saying that there is an amount of money that I am prepared to pay each month (i.e. what is now spent on Internet) for access to stuff without feeling restricted. So yeah, please, entertainment industry executive donkeys, start making sense.