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Studios Sue Oz ISP Over Allowing Piracy
Da Massive writes "Leading Hollywood film studios Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Disney Enterprises are suing Australia's second largest ISP, iiNet, saying it's complicit in the infringement of their copyrighted material. According to a statement of claim, 'the ISP knows that there are a large number of customers who are engaging in continuing infringements of copyright by using BitTorrent file sharing technology.'"
I'd bet money that iiNet is being targeted because of this story.
In other news, iiNet dropped from largest ISP to second largest ISP in Australia over the course of a week&interrobang;
I have no doubt they would have sued the CD/DVD recorder companies if the precedent hadn't already been set by their failed lawsuit against the VCR manufacturers.
That didn't stop them. Even though they lost the Betamax case circa 1980, they still sued Digital Audio Tape (DAT) and kept it out of America. Then they tried to sue Digital Compact Cassette and Minidisc, which led to inbuilt copy protection of these devices.
They will never stop. They fear losing their jobs and that's one powerful motive.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
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Every version/patch I have downloaded for NeoOffice has come from Bittorrent.
Bittorrent has a plethora of legal uses.
If there is an allegation of a crime it's up to the police to properly collect evidence and give it to the prosecutor's office, or the equivalent thereof in local terms.
Except.. in Australia(i don't know about other countries), it's not usually a crime to commit copyright infringement. From http://www.copyright.org.au/information/introduction/intro-9.htm
A person who infringes copyright can be sued by the copyright owner and taken to court. A court can order a range of things, including that the infringer pay compensation and pay the copyright owner's costs. In some cases, a person who infringes copyright can be charged by the police, and can be ordered to pay a fine or, in serious cases, jailed.
And from http://www.copyright.org.au/G052.pdf
Criminal penalties
In some circumstances, infringement of copyright is a criminal offence to which fines and jail terms may apply. The criminal provisions generally apply to commercial piracy, and are used particularly in relation to infringements of copyright in records, videos and computer software.
Unless there is large scale commercial piracy going on the police just won't care, and until then it's a civil dispute that to go before the courts.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
iiNet are being sued because they didn't do anything when the film companies sent them notices that some of their customers were pirating their media. They apparently sent 18 notices and iiNet refused to do anything because they were allegations rather than court ordered actions.
But they did do something about it. They passed the allegations on to the police. That is what anyone should do. It's the police's job to investigate allegations.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Try the first link in the summary. You have to actually read the article in full though.
I don't therefore I'm not.
IAAL, and I call BS. Truth matters plenty in court. What also matters is how skilfully you are able to demonstrate the truth to a court, and (probably most importantly) how well you are able to argue for your preferred application of the law to the 'truth' (i.e. facts).
I worked for a judge here in Australia for a year, and I do not believe he ever accepted a piece of evidence that was untrue. On the whole, I'd say we usually had a very strong understanding of the actual facts in each trial by the end of the evidence.
Incidentally, this will be a civil claim in Australia and will be heard by a judge, not a jury.
Read Pynchon.
That is beyond what they should do. The MPAA should have made their complaint to the police in the first place, and if the police decide to use their limited resources to follow it up, then and only then should iiNet get involved. Alternatively, if the MPAA starts a civil case and obtains a court order to get information out of iiNet.