John Linton Personally, I was brought up to respect other people's ownership of property and have lived my life to date on that basis. Clearly my parents and educators belong to a past era as, I suppose, I do. Theft of other people's property is viewed differently by the progeny of parents today which, apart from calling in to question how today's parents have failed in their overall duties to the societies that have been so good to them means that everyone is diminished - not just the parents and teachers themselves or their progeny and educational charges. No big deal - in a society where lying exceeds truth by an overwhelming margin, it is a matter of indifference that base ethics, let alone common courtesy, is progressively ever more absent from social interaction.
This is irrelevant to me personally or to Exetel as a commercial organisation in almost every respect until quite recently. The appearance of scum like the Movie Group have forced Exetel to have to consider the base ways we operate the core systems of our business simply because we must now consider which is the greater of the evils our current society has forced us to confront. In this case it is do we go out of our way to protect those of our customers who knowingly and willfully steal other people's property or do we allow them to be exposed to even scummier elements of our society (a couple of New Zealand hard core pornographers whose disgustingness is beyond belief) who might be able, amazingly and disappointingly, to use the Australian court system to allow them to be blackmailed? It's a tough decision and one that will cost us a lot of money to address (redefining base parameters within or core data base software and the writing new code) if our detestation of pornographers/blackmailers exceeds our personal dislike of thieves - which it almost certainly will. Strange that it has taken the obvious choice of detesting people who promote the physical and sexual assault of females far beyond the unethical and immoral casual thieves of intellectual property to cause us so much expense.
Which juxtaposes the issue highlighted in this:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204777904576653022926782608.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews
Because of copyright theft it is difficult to provide online content at a price that allows a commercial profit. Again, personally, I don't care - FoxTel has always provided whatever on line content I have wanted over the years and I've been prepared to pay the price for that since it first became available where I live. If it hadn't - then like so many other things in life I would have done without it and not been inconvenienced in any way at all as it would not have occurred to me to steal from other people to satisfy my desire for entertainment. But it does affect Exetel as a commercial organisation in as much as our residential customers, the honest ones, do have a desire for on line content that actions of copyright thieves make very difficult to provide.
FetchTV is something we have looked at over the past year and will look at again now that Optus is seriously promoting it but, from the 'research' we have done, it is a pretty poor alternative to the NetFlix offering and the cited article shows why that is likely to remain the case. Telstra has had at least two (non FoxTel) attempts at providing pay per view on line options, both of which bit the dust. NBNCo pushes the need for on line content delivery to make its fibre services appealing to legitimate users but the people to whom on line content 'appeals' won't pay for it when it is almost just as easy to steal it.
So by the end of this week copyright theft by some percentage of our customers will cost Exetel something over $200,000 the coming six months to change our core system code so that it only retains IP address information related to the last billing period to ensure blackmailing scum can't target our law breaking customers. Thanks a lot - really appreciate that. It will also delay any decision on enhancing the overall offering of additional content because we will almost certainly not be able to find a price for such a service that is more appealing than the current "free" obtainable by copyright thieves.
We live in strange times.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
ABN 350 979 865 46