It's 2010 – the era of YouTube and Hulu and of serious broadband and Gen-Y customers who love consuming digital media on-demand, online.

Imagine you own the copyright on a great movie and you wanted to make money from it.

How would you make money from that movie in 2010?

Would you do that by offering paid access to view it over the internet, or would you refuse to offer access to that content over the internet in any legal way at all?

Well, duh!

The recent federal case brought against iiNet Limited by Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (in essence, by 'Hollywood Inc') is a pivotal one at many levels (Full coverage: iiNet copyright case).

In the case just ended, iiNet and its staff were accused of committing an illegal act – of authorising copyright theft – and they were unambiguously cleared of that charge.

When Senator Conroy commented lately about how nice it'd be if AFACT and the internet industry could just kiss and make up, he blithely ignored the reality of the situation.

It is not the fault of ISPs that AFACT members' business models are under threat from the internet.

ISPs would love nothing more than to help AFACT members evolve their business models to meet the challenges of the modern world.

But we can't do that by being lined up as defendants in federal court.

ISPs in Australia would love to have their customers accessing a huge variety of legitimate AFACT member content legally and frequently over the internet in Australia on reasonable terms.

Whether and when that happens is not up to us, and it's not up to Australian internet users. It's entirely up to AFACT members.

While I expect AFACT to appeal the recent decision, and to keep doing so 'on principle' until the heat death of the universe, that's not actually what AFACT should be doing with its valuable time and its members' valuable funds.

So, what should AFACT do?

It should re-frame itself as the 'Australian Federated Accessible Content Trust' and start offering the combined Hollywood catalogue to ISPs in this country to license to our customers on reasonable terms, with minimum guarantees calibrated to the size of this market.

It should figure out that the concepts of 'content release windows' and zoning content geographically are as outdated as Windows 3.11.

It should get out of its own way and figure out how to open up hulu.com.au in Australia and soon.

And, it should figure out that treating its own end users in Australia as criminals-by-default is the activity of an industry segment that is missing the point.

We (the Internet Industry), and our customers (ordinary end users in Australia) would like nothing more than to make AFACT members richer by paying them for access to content on reasonable terms. We would love to help AFACT deliver a great, and financially rewarding path to content for our end users.

And it doesn't need another darn industry code of conduct, Senator Conroy. Industry codes are a tool to be used by cooperative people to solve a problem cooperatively. That isn't happening here. At least, not yet.

What AFACT needs to do is to put away the stick and starting using a carrot.

Wouldn't their shareholders be happier if Australia became the highest per-capita consumer of legally licensed views of their content?

Just start selling the stuff over the internet. It's not that hard, and you already do it in the USA.

Why won't you just do it here too?