APRA claims the internet would be empty without them
Here we go again… Stuff.co.nz reports that the new proposal is causing concern .. InternetNZ say “Nobody condones copyright abuse, but the termination of a household or business internet account is simply out of proportion to the alleged offence. Brett O’Riley warns that the regime could penalise education organisations, where it is difficult to identify the copyright infringer. Unfortunately APRA (who incidentally had their best year of profits ever last year) are still doing artists no favours by making absurd statements. Ant Healey claims that “Without the content industries, the internet would be empty.”. Well he’s completely right.. if you just ignore email, the largest encyclopedia humans have ever made, millions of legal software downloads, the 90% of YouTube content that is not infringing, Iranian activists and political speech, 60 million legal photos and millions of legal songs and videos for download and businesses, banks, health records, farmers, and others all using the internet to communicate.
At the recent Auckland meeting some time was spent discussing the questionable and unproven “statistics” that have been given by rights holders as an attempt to paint illegal downloading as a major revenue threat.
It was even admitted by one party that recent claims of internet traffic being significantly reduced around the time of the Internet Blackout, and subsequent increases following the suspension of s92A, were entirely fabricated.
With maliciously fabricated claims and fake statistics being thrown around it makes sense to be skeptical. We challenge journalists to ask where these statistics come from and particularly whether they are industry funded studies.
As the old saying goes: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
