Australia's Village Roadshow Is Taking Legal Action Against Piracy Sites

It’s a sad news day for all the swashbuckling pirates among you. Australian film company Village Roadshow has started a court action to shut down movie streaming website SolarMovie. After the Federal Government passed a bill to amended Australia’s copyright right laws in June of 2015, we were all expecting the worst. We’re sorry to say that while it’s taken eight months to affect any change, the laws are finally being utilised to our disadvantage.

We’re assuming that half of you reading this zoned out, opened IMDB in a new tab and are now slowly finding torrents to download every film in the top 1000 while you still can. Graham Burke, co-chief executive of Village Roadshow told the ABC they’ll be targeting SolarMovie, because they’re a “vicious bunch of thieves.” Burke went on to say the site's advertising was harmful to children “If your kids go to that website, they're encouraged to gamble with no age limit; there's sexual ads there." For the record, it’s called ad-blocker dude, look it up.

SolarMovie will most likely be black-listed for Aussies using DNS blocking, whereby the the DNS (domain name system), which connects readable site addresses with their internet address (IP address), is diverted and unable to connect the site name and the IP address. It's the simplest way to block sites but doesn't take the site offline at the source, so thankfully there are some easy ways around it. A VPN will do the trick, or there are more comprehensive (and free) services like TOR, which allows you browse anonymously but can seriously slow down your internet speeds as protects you by rerouting your web browsing over an encrypted network

It’s only the first in a series of court actions aimed at decimating our human right to watch Broad City for free. Foxtel is expected to announce in the coming days that they will seek to block four of the biggest piracy websites, including dear friend to all poor students, The Pirate Bay. People around the world are up in arms about harsh anti-piracy legislation, often because it errs on the side of media conglomerates, can strip people of their autonomy and doesn’t address the problem at the core of it all ($14.95 for an overnight release from Blockbuster was too much, damn it).

Australians have shown that they’re willing to spend money on legit streaming services (hello Netflix, Stan, maybe Presto) if easy and available and studies keep turning up the same data: people who pirate often spend more on media than people who don’t. Sigh. Guess it’s a good time to start shopping around for a VPN that works, guys.

Via ABC.