The Executive Director of anti-piracy advocacy group Creative Content Australia (CCA), which has been tracking piracy since 2008, says that ‘one out of every four Australians aged 12 years and over pirate screen content.’ While it hardly means that ‘everybody does it,’ 25% is certainly a high number.
“There are sufficient global research studies proving the impact that piracy has on box office revenue,” said Executive Director Lori Flekser in a prepared statement. But a hidden impact is “the loss of confidence of investors (whose) returns are likely to be obliterated by piracy,” she said.
Leadership role
In effort to get ahead of this situation, Australia enacted site-blocking legislation in 2015 which allows the Australian Federal Court to order Internet service providers to disable access to foreign infringing sites. At the time of the interview in January, nearly 1,700 domains and more than 519 sites had been blocked by order.
Read the interview at CCA’s Content Café
Why it matters
Ms. Flekser reiterates that monetary loss to the media companies is not the only problem associated with piracy; that it also affects the livelihoods of creative professionals, and opens consumers to malware.
CCA says that its biggest challenge is awareness, which is also its mission. CCA’s site provides a host of informative resources to help consumers find legal content, and to provide teachers with materials to educate students about copyright.
CCA commissions piracy behavior and consumer attitude studies on an ongoing basis. It will be interesting to see how the phenomenon evolves there.
