To Nobodys Surprise, Australian Terrorism Law May Be Used for Copyright EnforcementJeremy Malcolm The current party line, from flip-flopping Attorney-General George Brandis (whom some may remember from this train-wreck interview in which he attempted to define metadata) is that the new laws cant be and they wont be used to prosecute file sharers, because copyright infringement is only a civil offense. Except, of course, when it isnt. There are a wide range of criminal offenses defined under Australias copyright law, including penalties for sharing copyright works on (what is loosely defined as) a commercial scale, and penalties for breaking DRMboth of which result from Australias 2005 free trade agreement with the United States, and are likely to be replicated and perhaps toughened in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Moreover, as Minister for Communications, Malcolm Turnbull, has admitted, once the data has been collected and is being retained by an ISP, there is nothing to prevent a civil court from allowing access to that data to other parties, for purposes other than those the government intended. This might, for example, include a movie studio suing an ISP for release of retained customer data to support lawsuits or shakedown claims against those customers. (By no coincidence, exactly such a lawsuit is currently underway.) The only solution is the obvious onenot to require the collection and retention of the data in the first place. If data stored under a compulsory mandate can be misused for extraneous purposes, history tells us that it will be. This lesson lies behind the adoption of data minimization as a key principle of modern data protection lawa lesson that Australias lawmakers seem to have forgotten. If even the government itself cant give a clear account of what metadata will be collected and whether or not it will be used in enforcing copyright laws, why should ordinary Internet users have any faith that their collected data wont be misused in practice? Now is time for Australian users to stand up to their government and Stop the Spies, before its too late. Please visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where this first appeared, for the latest in digital privacy and civil liberties. 