While you have made some valid points on the evolution of options since the inception of digital distribution, I don’t think you should bite into any virtuous piracy “cause”. At the end of the day it’s come down to real world choices. How much is this service/product worth to me? In the western countries, we’ve become accustomed to just paying the sticker price for products or not buying it at all. In many parts of the world, people bargain for the products they want to buy. Think of how successful ebay, craigslist and other sites are nowadays. My point related to piracy is that it will always exist in one form or another. The benefit from the public’s standpoint is that now there is leverage from the public to drive down prices (sort of bargaining if you will). The producers will have to carefully ask themselves, “How much will people be willing to pay for this service/product of this quality and convenience?” rather than, “How much can I charge and get away with it?”. Of course, central assumptions I have are that: 1) People are generally willing to do the right thing. 2) Some people will pirate material whether they like it or not.

So people have touched upon censorship, but in the big picture, is this a future trend? China's current implementation of the Great Firewall and now this? This may have a larger impact than most people think and I'm not big on fear mongering. Reduction of the access and free exchange of information breaks down the fundamental usefulness of the internet and if greater organizations (I say organizations because even if a country doesn't do it, but ISP monopolies worldwide do, the results are similar) continue down this path the internet will devolve into something resembling television: a passive experience with controlled and filtered inputs and outputs.

Last tin-foil hat thought: The reason I'm concerned about this is that I've been confident that these attempts to censor or filter the internet in the past were futile because, like water confronting a rock in its path, the information will flow around the damage. But if things go the way of "1984", the general public just won't know of any better if they are brought up in a filtered environment and what they're missing. I'm straining my memory, but I believe in Orwell's book, they removed terms to describe dissent or hatefulness so that people would be unable to express their dissatisfaction. AOL users thought that their world WAS, in fact, the internet until they changed ISPs.

Alright I'm digressing. If I lived in Australia, I would fight tooth and nail against this. To redirect the "Think of the Children" play, even if they are not subject to illegal or lewd material early on, it's still out there. A more reasonable action would be educating in school safe surfing of the web, how to determine reliable and unreliable sources and proper teaching of ethics in a more subjective and technologically advanced world. My last example is this: Would you rather have teach someone walking down the street why its important not to break into someone's house or line the doors and windows with spikes and barbwire? Think of the children!!!!

/rant over. I'm getting some coffee.