Hollywood
is not the only casualty of P2P.

In 1998, Forrester Research published a report on the online
“adult content” industry which speculated on an industry-wide
aggregate figure of $8-10 billion

The prefix porno- is derived from the Greek
term for a prostitute; hence, it may be argued that pornography is as old as the
“world’s oldest profession”.

It has been a long
held belief that sex drives technology and its depiction in various media
formats has been a common tool in expressing resistance against authority. Be
it Religious, legislative, societal norms, or well meaning parents.

Sculpture[i]
and Painting from early cave man times often depicted acts of copulation and
male and female genitalia.

With the advent of
writing early scribes adorned their works with hand coloured caricatures that
were often voluptuous and sometimes incongruously presented, e.g.: The Bible[ii]

The invention of the
Gutenberg Press in 1440 made books, easier to produce and cheaper and it was no wonder that the
sizable market in books often including plates of damsels, elicited a  predictable response from the Church; Pope Paul IV in 1563 listed erotic books in the  Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of church prohibited literature.

The Photograph (1839) expanded on naked caricatures and replaced
them with young ladies in risqué poses and precipitated the first “anti-porn Legislation.

Banning didn’t stop the trade in printed pornography. It just
drove it underground and as all black markets function, made the content more
expensive. The push to control
or stop sexual content from being seen by people has continued through the ages
and now we tend to accept that consumption of pornography equals aberrant
behaviour… although there are plenty of other examples of content that is
aberrant to societal ‘norms’ that are accepted by religious groups, governments
and parents: such as the violent pornographic images of women and children
being wounded or slaughtered in war zones around the world, seen on the evening
news. These may not shock in the same way that violent porn may do, but
nevertheless the impact is not dissimilar.

The Stereograph (the worlds
first 3D media – 1840), The Radio (1920s), The Television(1950’s), VCR’s (1981),
CD (1992), DVD’s (1997) and now the Internet were all widely adopted initially because
they allowed the masses at home to view or listen or listen and view content
“PRIVATELY” in their own home.

There is evidence
that the Pornography industry has been solicited by the standards authorities
and manufacturers of new forms of media for their views, opinions and
suggestions about proposed formats.[iii]

In 1999 I was an ISP
on two continents and I wrote an email
about the quantity of Pornography that was transiting the internet at two
locations in the US. Mae East and Mae West.

My claim derived from
packet sniffing the peering backbone was that there was around 87% of content
that was or could be pornography.

It appeared to me,
that the availability of Pornographic images (since 1979 on BBS) and now
multi-media content on the Internet was opening the flood gates to an aberrant future where the
major questionable truism was the massive erosion of my profit margins
(bandwidth – not porn).

But then Napster was born and the Porn
web pages started to be re-organised by overly capable 15 year olds from web
pages for their mates to Napster listed resources.

Because Geko
(my ISP) was the global host to the worlds biggest Quake game my concentration
was focused on adding more bandwidth for game players than worrying about the
occasional user that downloaded porn.

But by 2000 I had
started to notice a drop-off effect. Traffic was changing. Music files appeared
to overtake Porn as the bandwidth hog.

Socially speaking
that was probably a good thing, however, my bandwidth was still being eroded….

Fast Forward –
January, 2009 – Sydney, a house in the suburbs…..

A quick poll of the
milleniumite[iv]
members of the household (both of them) confirmed to me that 3D action based
games were a far higher priority in the minds of the male population of the
house than naked forms gyrating in obviously posed and uncomfortable positions.

This was evident in
the unanimous requirement that I install 802.11n equipment to replace the
802.11g that just didn’t cut mustard with the Ps2 (the 18yo) and Ps3 (the 22yo)
interaction.

It would appear that
todays youth – do not want Porn. They want access to entertainment. Games, Movies and
Youtube.

Empirical data from
multiple cited sources[v]
suggest that the high availability of Pornography has made its acquisition a
much lower priority for milleniumites.

According to Ipoque, 22% of Internet users generate 76% of
all internet traffic via Bit Torrent or emule 
downloading 38% movies, 25% Games 14% TV shows 9% music and only 1%
porn.

In Summary, it would appear demographically, that net
denizens of at least three years vintage and those of legal adulthood, move
away from Porn as a primary interest and start using P2P for entertainment.

Thankyou Hollywood,
the Music Industry and Microsoft – it seems that our littleuns are growing up
without us having to look over their shoulders constantly – except to ensure
they are not exceeding their monthly download bandwidth limitations.

Based on the foregoing, where are these continuing claims
for porn originating from and why[vi] ?

In Australia, hyped media stories about the high volumes of
Internet Porn have led to the Crimes
Legislation Amendment (Telecommunications Offences and Other Measures) Act (No.
2) 2004 requiring ISP’s and Carriers to report illegal (juvenile
orientated) pornographic materials on their networks and to the current
attempts at instigating an Internet Filter[vii].

Lobbying
of the Australian Government has been undertaken by such misinformed
individuals as the Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES requesting the NSW
Parliament to be more active in banning Pornography even though his
allegations about pornography enciting young males of both Indigenous and
Eurpoean origin to instigate predatory behaviour towards Juveniles is in direct
contrast with all published academic works on the subject of non-indegenous
attacks [specifically, citing the Meese Report;] “In none of
the studies cited “has a measure of motivation such as 'likelihood to
rape' ever changed as a result of exposure to pornography”]; and reference to
Indigenous sexual miscreant behaviour refers to the 10,000 year old Aboriginal
tradition of taking a bride at age 13. Specifically:

6.23 In
Aboriginal customary law, marriages may be agreed between the prospective husband and the persons responsible for a young girl.20 This is a
contract to which the child is not a party. The contract
imposes material obligations on the prospective
husband with respect to the child and her fa mily; and obligations on the parents and child with respect to the prospective husband.

6.24
Generally speaking, the child is expected to understand the nature of the
contract when she reaches puberty (say 12 or 13).[viii]

Nevertheless, it is the authors contention that the
Government is using such claims to instigate (initially in Australia) an http
filter for ostensibly restricting access to child pornographic content, which
once implemented will be easy to expand to include other “unspecified,
inappropriate content”

When questioned about the unprecedented
move for a Government to filter its citizens Internet, Senator Stephen Conroy
replied that the UK, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand have already implemented similar
filtering systems with no impact to performance.

Unfortunately for the
Senator, Google isn’t included on the restricted sites yet
and a series of google searches resulted in discovering that the UK Government
is precluded from introducing online censorship by the Communications Act and
BT does provide a parental “voluntary” clean feed to their customers “on
request” In Canada eight ISPs run a “voluntary” parental control feed, again on
request – there has been no Government intervention or legislation. A single
ISP in Sweden runs an optional blacklist – by user
request – Potential misuse of this voluntary system was highlighted recently
when the Swedish Police threatened (unsuccessfully) to stop Torrent P2P by
having the Pirate Bay “Blacklisted as a child Pornography
site.” And in respect to New Zealand – what filter ?

So why against all this
evidence and the public outcry does the Labour Government insist on installing
the filter.

Well, one reason as pointed
out in Stilgherians Blog Page on the subject tells us that 20,646 Church going Australians
signed a dozen petitions to have the internet filtered. (Remember the good Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES misquoting data ?)

So
– is it about Petitions ? Because if so, Getup.org.au have
collected nearly 95,0000 petitions for the other side of the argument.

But I don’t think the Government will listen to the Filter Nay-sayers.
After all, Australia is a member of WIPO and they do want to show the US Government
how clever they are.

It may well suit the Government to control what the public
consume intellectually.

In that way, taxes are paid, public discussion and dissension
are kept to a minimum and we are all good little sheep. (As in sheep to the
slaughter….)

I think David Edwards[ix] in his
1992 article possibly said it the best:

“We are faced with the difficult question of balancing
individual liberty against an externally enforced “security.” Freedom
carries with it an inextricable element of danger. In order to eliminate the
dangers associated with freedom, we would need to render freedom
unrecognizable.”

I believe that this
nation has been to war on a number of occasions – The First World War, The
Second World War, the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq to defend
this country against anti-democratic regimes, facists and Dictators, but
principally, to defend the free world against all forms of political or religious
persecution and to defend the right of free speech.

I refuse to believe that the current Labour Party has
forgotten about the Australian lives forfeited over the last hundred years in our
attempts to preserve these freedoms, not only for ourselves but generously for
others.

We all remember the
famous quote “I'm mad as hell, and Im not going to take it any more”

I love that quote…. If I wrote it today, I would make just a
minor change

“I'm mad as hell,
and Im not going to take
your bullshit about the filter any more”

Try saying it to yourself… sounds good doesn’t it. Now open
the windows [Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Myspace – all your friends], lean out and
shout……

References:

http://www.nt.gov.au/justice/docs/lawmake/ntlrc_final_report.pdf Retrieved 17 January, 2009