The Federal Court has finally ordered Australian internet service providers (ISPs) to start blocking access to popular torrenting sites; including The Pirate Bay, TorrentHound and SolarMovie. In around a fortnight it will be much more difficult for the average person to access these sites and others like them in Australia. With that in mind, we think it's worth revisiting the original court documents that reveal the sites, services and URLs that Foxtel and Village Roadshow are seeking to block in Australia. Here is the full list along with the reasoning behind the ban. The war on online piracy just got more interesting with Foxtel and Village Roadshow successfully blocking five popular torrent websites through the courts. The five sites on the ban list are The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt and SolarMovie. Australian ISPs - including Telstra, Optus, TPG, M2, Dodo and iiNet - have just 15 days to comply with the order. We originally reported the below list back in February but figured many of you would want to take another look in light of yesterday's announcement.
Interestingly, Foxtel and Village Roadshow took a two-pronged approach with their legal actions: Foxtel's application targeted the four aforementioned torrent sites, while Village Roadshow went after the streaming site SolarMovie. Both companies have also named multiple URLs for the sites they are seeking to block. In other words, a simple suffix change will not be enough to circumvent the ban. Here's the full list: In the same document, Foxtel explained the reason it was filing legal action as follows: A significant factor in Foxtel’s ability to attract subscribers is the exclusivity in Australia of a proportion of the programming it offers, including the Programs, the Australian premieres of which were exclusive to Foxtel's subscription television services. Foxtel’s programs have been, and continue to be, available without charge outside Foxtel’s subscription packages, and Foxtel has thereby suffered and will suffer loss and damage, including lost subscription fees, lost opportunity to earn subscription fees, lost opportunity to earn licensing fees, and other damage from loss of control over copyright in episodes of the Programs.
The reason for the primary purpose of The Pirate Bay [et al] is to infringe or facilitate the infringement of copyright (whether or not in Australia). Foxtel also accused The Pirate Bay, et al, of encouraging internet users to infringe copyright by using their websites. "[These sites] had and have the power to prevent the infringements by Internet Users including the infringing acts pleaded above; have chosen not to take any or any sufficient steps to prevent such infringements or continuing infringements," Foxtel said in the particulars of the document. Village Roadshow's legal action was quite similar. It also mentioned specific movies including Jurassic World, Straight Outta Compton and The Lego Movie. You may recall that the theatrical release of the latter was controversially delayed in Australia, a decision that Village Roadshow explicitly blamed for the movie's high piracy levels. it's doing the same thing with the LEGO movie sequel.) We strongly doubt that Foxtel and Village Roadshow will rest idle after this victory.
You can expect more torrent and streaming sites to be added to the ban list, pending approval from the court. Now that a legal precedent has been set, subsequent URL blocks will likely pass without problem. If a website lets you view material that Foxtel or Village Roadshow own the rights to, it probably isn't safe. Tell us what you think about these developments in the comments.Action Girl: Wyldstyle and Princess Uni-kitty at the very end. Adaptation Explanation Extrication: Emmet talking to Lord Business in the finale and convincing him to do a Heel�Face Turn is kept in the Junior Novel and Video Game, but the context for whynote isn't. Interestingly, the video game keeps the Plot Twist from the film, but still . Affectionate Parody: The movie frequently (though not completely) parodies summer blockbuster movies. The fact that Everything's Built with LEGO helps, as even the most spectacular explosions and overloaded action sequences end up becoming sillier as a result. Especially the scene with the real-life kid, which Emmet views as an Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever.
Allegory Adventure: The movie notably toys with this trope. The entire plot of the film is presented In-Universe as a metaphor for Finn's playtime in his dad's study, which explains why the ancient "relics" of human artifacts can appear alongside LEGO bricks. However, Emmet, complete with mental voiceover, is able to consciously move himself in this world, albeit with great difficulty. It's left to the viewer's interpretation whether or not the whole movie took place in Finn's head, or if the world of LEGO is its own universe that Finn and Dad can just manipulate. And the Adventure Continues: "We are fwom the pwanet Duplo, and we are hew to destwoy you!" Arc Words: "See everything" is used repeatedly to refer to the power of the Master Builders to see the potential in the pieces around them. Lord Business's obsession with keeping everything "how it is supposed to be." . "Now it's your turn to be the hero." Finn says that to Emmet during his vision, and Emmet says it to Wyldstyle before his Heroic Sacrifice.
The power of the Special is... you're special. Artistic License � Chemistry: The mineral spirits The Man Upstairs uses to un-Kragle the Lego universe at the end would almost certainly remove the paint used to give minifigs their faces and clothing details, in the same way Lord Business uses nail polish remover to remove Bad Cop's "Good" face. We can safely assume that, being a Lego connoisseur, he was probably careful with the stuff. Ascended Meme: In the "Behind the Bricks" featurette, Vitruvius talks about how great it is that he's voiced by Morgan Freeman, noting the famous joke that "that man could read the phone book and make it sound interesting." He then proceeds to do just that.Vitruvius: Five five five, three four nine two. Just listen to that rich molasses.If Australia's plan to implement UK-style piracy website blocking is such a good idea, how did the Brits just break piracy records downloading The Grand Tour?After arguing about online piracy for years, Australia has finally reached the point where internet service providers such as Telstra, Optus and TPG will be forced to block access to BitTorrent search engines like The Pirate Bay and illegal streaming sites like SolarMovie.
It's taken this long because, while Australian copyright holders are always quick to complain about piracy, they shoot themselves in the foot whenever they're given the opportunity to do something about it.The Dallas Buyers Club case was thrown out because the rightsholders failed to convince the judge that extortion tactics were off the table. Meanwhile the three-strikes rule, threatening to hand over the contact details of repeat offenders, withered on the vine because the movie studios expected Australia's ISPs to pick up the bill.Arguments over costs have also delayed Australia's website blocking regime, but the judge has finally decreed that ISPs must abide by court orders to block piracy websites. The rightsholders will be forced to foot the bill, paying $50 per blocked domain as well as the ISPs' legal costs.Australia's ISPs now have until the end of the month to block these sites and redirect users to a landing page notifying them of the court's decision. So was it worth all the trouble?
Just as with the abandoned Great Australian Firewall, it will be ludicrously easy for Australians to beat the new piracy block. For evidence you need look no further than the UK where they've had piracy website filtering in place for five years. When Top Gear hosts Clarkson, Hammond and May defected from the BBC to Amazon, to start The Grand Tour, UK viewers followed – but not all of them did the right thing and signed up for Amazon Prime Video. Claims that The Grand Tour is the most pirated show ever are wrong, it's more like the most pirated British show, but of the millions of people who downloaded the show it seems 13.7 per cent of them were located the UK – although the percentage is probably higher considering that some Brits would be masking their location.So how can the Brits download the The Grand Tour when British ISPs block access to BitTorrent search engines like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents? They use tricks so simple that primary school children already employ them to access Facebook in the classroom.
Beating Australia's piracy filter will probably be as simple as visiting one of countless proxy websites and using that site as the middleman to access The Pirate Bay. The judge won't sign off on blocking every proxy site on the web, and even if they did new sites pop up faster than you can whack them.ISPs are likely to block websites by editing their DNS listings, which works like the telephone directory of the web by converting URLs into IP addresses.Beating this might be as simple as switching from your ISP's DNS servers to a third-party service like Google's 8.8.8.8 – which might even boost your page load times while restoring access to BitTorrent search engines. It's a trick that works in some countries but not others, depending on how they've implemented their website blocking.As a step up from here you might engage a free or paid Virtual Private Network and connect to another country without a piracy filter. A VPN is pretty much a foolproof way to beat web filtering because your ISP can't see what you're doing inside the encrypted connection.
Once again, the courts will never crackdown on VPNs – at least not in Australia – because they have so many legit privacy and security uses.As a final resort you might turn to TOR, which encrypts your traffic and bounces it around the web to make it hard to track, but TOR isn't for tourists and it's total overkill for beating a piracy filter when there are so many other options.Just like the Brits, Australians will use all these tricks to easily bypass filtering efforts. Australian piracy rates might appear to drop, but only because because some Australians will cover their tracks and appear to be located elsewhere.It's often said that piracy is primarily a matter of pricing and convenience, and most people will do the right thing if they feel they're getting a fair deal. While Village Roadshow is pushing for website blocking, it's also repeating the mistakes it made with The Lego Movie by delaying the cinema release of The Lego Batman Movie in Australia by seven weeks. It's likely to cost millions of dollars in lost sales due to piracy, but apparently it's easier to push for ineffective web filtering than it is to give the people want they want.