The Australian organisation tasked with protecting the copyright of film and television studios locally has warned the nation has a love affair with BitTorrent haven the Pirate Bay and other sites which allow files to be traded online through peer to peer file sharing technologies.

The comments came in a submission to the Federal Government’s Media Convergence Review, which is currently examining how ongoing technology changes are reshaping the media landscape from how it looked in the 1990’s — which is when much of Australia’s current media and communications regulations were established.

In the submission, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, which represents a number of film and television studios locally, warned the nation visited file sharing sites like the Pirate Bay.

“AFACT has analysed the top 100 most popular and visited sites in Australia according to their Alexa ranking, and it is apparent that Australians also have a strong preference for infamous pirate sites,” the organisation said, noting the Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Hotfile.com and MediaFire.com were all in the nation’s top 100 sites — with the Pirate Bay being Australia’s 40th favourite site.

The figures as calculated by AFACT purported to show that such sites were more popular in Australia than in the UK and US — where the Pirate Bay was only the 60th and 81th most popular web site respectively, according to AFACT.

In its submission, AFACT said there was also evidence to suggest that — although legitimate files are also traded on file sharing sites — most of the files traded were in fact infringing copyright.

“In two separate data samples which the researchers analysed, it was found that at least 89 percent of all files traded on BitTorrent were infringing,” wrote AFACT. “It also found 70 percent of all content being traded was motion pictures or television shows — none of which was identified as legal, and much of which is the intellectual property belonging to our representative companies.”

AFACT’s unhappiness with the file trading situation has over the past few years led it into a high-profile lawsuit against major local broadband provider iiNet; a case which it lost, but has subsequently appealed. In addition, the organisation has sent letters to a number of other ISPs requesting they pass on requests to users to stop infringing copyright through file trading.

“In a converged world, the business models for delivery and consumption of content services are adapting and evolving, but the underlying intellectual property framework (especially copyright) must be maintained,” wrote AFACT in its submission, which outlined a variety of associated issues it believed the convergence review should take into account.

“Creators, providers and owners of content in the content supply value chain have a legitimate expectation that their rights will continue to be protected, despite increasing convergence,” it added.

However, not everyone appeared to have the same view as AFACT with respect to the future of content online. A joint submission by Google, Yahoo!7 and eBay to the Convergence Review took the optimistic view of the emerging online content delivery space.

“Continued innovation and investment in the Australian digital economy — further facilitated by the opportunities that will be created by the National Broadband Network — represents an opportunity for almost unlimited potential to deliver even more innovation in the types of content creation, delivery and consumption models that will be available to the Australian content industry and the Australian public,” the trio wrote.

The online giant’s submission also highlighted the fact that today’s consumers had a much more active method of consuming content — arguing that regulatory models which relied on a top-down “publisher to audience approach” to content regulation may no longer make sense.

Image credit: Penny Mathews, royalty free