Külföldi torrent oldalak Anti-piracy Crusader Graham Burke On Illicit Downloading, Failure And Exercise

The co-chief of Village Roadshow, Graham Burke, is on a mission to convince Australians that online piracy is wrong - and he's prepared to sue you to do it. Given that so many of us pirate, Burke faces an uphill battle.


Graham Burke is obsessed with three things right now: online piracy, Queensland rainfall trends and his bathroom scales.

I'm at Rockpool Bar & Grill in Sydney's CBD to have lunch with Burke, perhaps the most influential person in Australia's internet piracy debate and a man known to stalk parliament as a lobbyist.

He also happens to be a BRW magazine rich-lister (his shares are worth about $153 million on a good day).

It's just after noon and the 72-year-old co-chief executive officer of Village Roadshow – which has interests in cinema, theme parks, film production and distribution – arrives bang on time.

But if piracy is the issue, then what about countering it with cheaper movie downloads on the internet, and releasing them in a timely way?

Burke admits movie downloads used to be "hugely expensive" in Australia, but Village recently "brought that down ... to less than the UK and marginally behind America".

But despite this, he maintains that online piracy continues to be a huge problem.

I suggest it's partly because of the typical 90-day window between a movie's theatrical release and its digital version becoming available.

In 2012, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, then in Opposition, said to curb online piracy, studios needed to release their movies earlier for download.

"All they are doing is throwing money away by not making it available instantly," Mr Turnbull said.

Burke doesn't explicitly disagree, but says that gap - known as the "piracy window" - is always going to have exist to ensure films remain viable.

"Feature films cost between $3 million, $5 million and $300 million," he says. "So there has to be a window or the model won't work."

Village's recent submission on copyright infringement to the federal government argued that the dangers posed by online piracy were so great that the end goal should be "total eradication or zero tolerance" in Australia.

"Piracy is still somewhat on the fringes but it has the potential to become universal unless it's addressed." He says a tripartite initiative is needed to curb the problem.

First he says rights holders need to win the hearts and minds of Australians by getting across to them "the fact that [downloading illicitly] is theft, and there will be no creativity, there will be no movies" if they continue pirating.