The hunt for Australians who have illegally downloaded Dallas Buyers Club is only the latest act by an industry that doesn't understand how its own business works, writes Peter Green.

The announcement that Dallas Buyers Club LLC - the legal entity that owns the rights to the 2013 movie - is endeavouring to hunt down individuals who downloaded the movie illegally in Australia is not entirely surprising. Similar actions have been brought against individual pirates in the US in the past, and if you’re hunting online pirates, then Australian bandwidth is what one might describe as a target-rich environment.

This is not to say however that these actions are even remotely justified, or that they will be successful.

Let’s talk about why people stole Dallas Buyers Club in Australia. We live in a world where the tyranny of distance has been virtually removed by the rise of international globalised commerce. There is no good reason why anything smaller than a cruise liner should take three months and twelve days to get from the United States to Australia. But that is exactly how long it took for Dallas Buyers Club to make it to our secluded colonial backwater. The US release was on the November 1; we didn't see it until the February 13. We had to wait a fortnight longer than Finland.

Delayed release is one of the biggest triggers for piracy, and yet movie studios in particular continue to expect that Australian audiences will wait patiently while the rest of the world enjoys the content we want to watch. It’s an assumption that is built on a pre-internet understanding of how international business works, and yet it is allowed to persist, and even enjoys strong support from our own government.

It has been shown repeatedly that if entertainment companies are willing to provide their products to Australian audiences at a reasonable price point, and in a timely fashion that consumers will be willing to obtain it through legal channels. This sentiment was articulated by iiNet in several forums, including a post earlier this year. iiNet was the first Australian Internet service provider to stand up for the interests of its consumers, but in the face of this latest insult from international studios and business interests, they are no longer alone.

Optus and Telstra have joined iiNet in saying that they will not cooperate with Dallas Buyers Club LLC in identifying individuals who have stolen content online. This is in line with comments from the industry in relation to several of the proposed versions of the federal government’s anti-piracy agenda, which fell flat because there is no incentive for ISPs to prosecute users whose crime is against a third party. Telstra is a lot of things to a lot of Australians, but it seems pretty determined not to become a law enforcement body targeting its own consumers exclusively.

So this seems to be where we find our stalemate. On one side, US studios stubbornly refusing to redress their radically out-dated business models (all the while endlessly lambasting Australian consumers for tearing the bottom out of the market and refusing to pay money for content that costs millions to produce). And on the other, Australian ISP’s steadfastly refusing to gut their own businesses in the name of misplaced and poorly justified American outrage.

Peter Green is a student, founder and editor of thebucketjournal.com and regular contributor to Radio Monash. View his full profile here.