With the file-sharing crackdown, will Aussie pirates turn legit or move underground?
How much will Australians spend to avoid paying for content?
Regardless of their intention, it's clear that Turnbull and Brandis' metadata retention scheme will present a juicy target for movie studios. ASIO and the Federal police might not be interested in chasing pirates, but those who are – like the movie houses – will fight for access to the treasure trove of metadata which they hope will lead them to Australian pirates.
Of course it's laughably easy to bypass the government's metadata retention scheme along with any other Australian internet filtering or surveillance attempts. These workarounds will catch on just as quickly as BitTorrent did – they're a Google search away and it's pointless to pretend that they don't exist.
For people looking to hide their activities from prying eyes, a foreign-based virtual private network is the jack-of-all-trades solution. It makes a secure encrypted connection from your computer, out through your ISP and across the ocean to a VPN server on the other side of the world. VPNs are designed to protect honest people against hackers but, like any tool, they can also be used by people looking to evade the authorities.
There's no practical way the government can crack down on movie pirates using a VPN, because VPNs have so many legitimate uses. It would be like shutting down the freeways during peak hour – stopping millions of people getting to work in the hope of catching a handful of wrongdoers.
The Feds might be able to see that you're using a VPN and how much data you're shifting, but they can't see exactly what you're doing. This of course depends on your faith in encryption but, even if the spooks do have a backdoor into VPNs, they're certainly not going to reveal it just so they can catch you downloading Dallas Buyers Club.
There are free VPN services but if you want decent and reliable download speeds you might find yourself paying a few dollars per month for a premium service. Even then your downloads are at the mercy of the VPN server's internet connection, but there are alternatives.
People using a BitTorrent client like uTorrent can turn to proxy services like TorrentPrivacy and BTGuard, along with VPN services like Private Internet Access, which are all designed to mask your identity so your activities are only traced back to their servers. They also cost a few dollars per month and some even accept BitCoin if you're concerned about your payments being tracked. It's also possible to encrypt your BitTorrent traffic, which can help bypass any peer-to-peer throttling applied by your ISP.
The next step up is to pay for a "seedbox", which is basically a hosted BitTorrent server which resides outside Australia and downloads your files in the cloud. You can then download the files from the seedbox to your computer. This way you're one-step removed from the BitTorrent network. There are plenty of other ways to shift around large files, such as file-sharing sites and Usenet newsgroups.
The catch is that many of these methods for sidestepping the law will cost you a few dollars per month – money that you might have otherwise spent on legitimate local content. At what point does it become cheaper and easier to pay for content rather than steal it?
Content providers have come a long way in the last few years in offering us a better deal, but it remains to be seen if their efforts will encourage pirates to straighten up and fly right or whether pirates will just take extra precautions – even if it means spending money.
Where do you spend your cash, on local content or on ways to hide your downloading habits?
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