Rights holders ought to have the ability to take the less expensive route of getting sites to be blocked by ISPs through the Federal Circuit Court, instead of the Federal Court, the Australian Copyright Council has claimed.

The council’s executive director Fiona Phillips made the proposition in one of the first entries printed from the parliamentary investigation into the laws. The Bill as it stands would enable rights holders to get a court order to block sites hosted abroad that are primarily with the aim of copyright infringement.

This would mean that torrent websites like The Pirate Bay would be blocked under the laws.

“We’re concerned that restricting the authority to the Federal Court of Australia may prejudice the ability of individual creators to obtain this treatment, and could otherwise alter the cost effectiveness of the system,” Phillips said.

Given that websites need to be for the “main objective” of on-line copyright infringement, the council said this may be a “threshold so high as to make the regime almost unworkable”.

“They’re leeches living off stolen merchandise. Also, pirate websites are a sleazy neighbourhood which our kids go to, and they’re selling hard-core pornography and scams including party pills and steroids,” he said.

Burke said if piracy is not discontinued, theaters in local towns would shut down.

“In case the item is stolen, there will probably not be any utility, and not only will there be substantial job losses but arguably the soul of communities will go dark.”

Hamlet is, in addition, apparently in a dispute, blocking the opening of an independent theater in Geelong West.

The Communications Alliance, representing the majority of the Australian ISP business, stated the laws has to define how websites ought to be blocked, either at the IP address, the URL, or the DNS level. The ISPs also need checks to be undertaken before websites are blocked, to make sure that valid websites are not blocked accidentally.

There ought to even be a landing page for the websites blocked to describe the reason why they’ve been blocked, the Comms Alliance said.

Above all else should have their costs covered by rights holders, and iSPs should be offered from being sued by the website owners, the Comms Alliance said.

But Burke compared ISPs’ business model to a factory, and indicated that ISPs could bear the expense of enforcing not only the website-blocking laws, but in addition the copyright code.

“Hamlet considers that ISPs created an excellent company, but, such as, for instance, a factory spilling effluent into a river, the unintentional result of their company is piracy, with its damning effects on our people, our culture, as well as the market,” he said.

“VPN services themselves are usually general purpose internet services which can be utilized for a lot of other lawful functions, also it appears disproportionate to let these lawful services to be blocked only on account of the means they are promoted,” the EFF said.

“The Bill is a chance to clarify the standing of VPNs so that these services aren’t themselves subject to blocking, restricting consumer access to paid foreign content.”

The Tim Wilson of the Human Rights Commission said that he considers ceasing human rights are improving.

Nevertheless, he added the authorities should introduce a “fair use” exception in the Copyright Act to make certain content that will come under a fair use exclusion in states other than Australia wouldn’t be blocked under Australian copyright law.