A new bill being considered in Australia could outlaw the use of VPNs in that country in the name of fighting piracy. Australia has flirted with Internet censorship for at least a decade — various proposals for filtering the ‘Net have been proposed, typically on “Think of the children” grounds. But this new bill is different. Unlike previous efforts, it doesn’t attempt to justify itself as a measure to improve public safety or security.

The first line of the bill’s general outline reads: “The purpose of this Bill is to introduce a key reform to reduce online copyright infringement. The scheme is deliberately prescriptive; it is intended as a precise response to a specific concern raised by copyright owners.”

Such candor is refreshing. The US could learn from Australia’s example.

It continues: “3.The Bill provides that copyright owners would be able to apply directly to the Federal Court for an injunction to disable access to an infringing online location… The injunction power would only apply to online locations operated outside Australia.” [Emphasis added].

That last sentence is critical to understanding the purpose of the bill. If you live in the United States, you have access to a huge amount of content from online services like Hulu and Netflix. Travel to a foreign country and connect to your Netflix or Hulu account, and the amount of content available to you will fall dramatically. It doesn’t matter if you have a verified US billing address — just because you can watch Futurama on Netflix when sitting at home doesn’t mean you can watch it while traveling abroad.

This walled garden approach makes it more difficult for services like Netflix to operate in foreign markets, and it tends to anger customers who believe they should have access to an entire general catalog rather than being arbitrarily restricted. As a result, many foreign subscribers also buy access to a VPN that has a US server. Connect to that server before you sign into your service, and boom — you can happily watch US content.

Is this piracy?

According to the copyright industry, this is piracy — but as someone who firmly believes that copying a piece of software you haven’t paid for is theft, this still strikes me as a bridge too far. When you copy a file or stream from an illicit site, you’re watching content without having paid for a license to do so. If you have a Netflix subscription, you’ve paid the same amount as a US citizen would — but you’re not getting the content that a US citizen would have access to. This is particularly true if you’re a US citizen traveling abroad. There’s no language localization costs incurred in sending the American version of a TV show to Australia for viewing — and therefore no good reason why Australians shouldn’t have access to the entire Netflix catalog.

The goal of this bill is to give the copyright industry a direct line to the court system for the purposes of shutting down Australian citizens who use Internet services to access such content streams. Apparently, such use is widespread, with reports that “hundreds of thousands” of Australians use VPN services for precisely this purpose.

The logical, rational response to such a discovery is to work to eliminate the artificial barriers that keep content siloed between nations. If more content was available on local services, Australians would have precious little reason to ban VPNs. Instead, the government is pushing forward with a bill that could effectively kill VPN services, provided the copyright owners come forward with claims that the primary purpose of these services is to infringe on their content.

If nothing else, it proves the industry is at least consistent. For nearly two decades, the MPAA and RIAA have refused to consider the idea that their distribution methods and systems were outdated, or that they could reduce piracy by offering people the content they want at reasonable prices. It’s good to see such myopic short-sightedness is alive and well on both hemispheres of the globe.