AU Legal Group Says ISP Allowed 100K Illegal Downloads

In Australia, a court wrapped up day one of what promises to be a 4-week trial of media interests against ISP iiNet. Reader bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft investigators claim to have recorded almost 100,000 instances of Australian internet service provider iiNet users making available online unauthorized copies of films and TV programs, lawyers for the film industry said in the Federal Court in Sydney today. The lawyers for the film industry claimed iiNet had done 'nothing' to discourage copyright infringement on its network. iTnews also has a background piece on the case, with a Flash-y graph."

Comments

New Zealand faces similar problems :(

[Anonymous Coward]

The New Zealand equivalent to AFACT are creatively called NZFACT, and they said that they want to be able to punish people based on accusations of infringement

"[NZFACT] envisaged ISPs would act on infringement notices generated automatically by copyright holders, who would identify infringers by tracking traffic on file-sharing sites." -- Creative Freedom Foundation

What's more is there's a kiwi group of 10 thousand artists against NZFACT because they're sick of being misrepresented. here's their press release tearing into NZFacT.

Re:Pax

[rtb61]

Well in this case it is even more interesting, they are not just trying to claim copyright theft on their works but on the title of their works. They claimed 29,914, hmm, did they download and validate that those titles as listed where in fact the works they claim to have ownership or did they just look at the title and pretend it was evidence. Lets see 97,942 instances even music at three minutes a piece that is still 4,800 hours of works they claim to a checked and confirmed as their content.

So the Federation Against Copyright Theft claim that iiNet has not monitored and censored their users, well I should hope not, as that would be an illegal and criminal act and iiNet would rightfully be sued for attempting to do so by their users and, of course prosecuted under law. In Australia it is a criminal act for companies to monitor telecommunications for any reason other than strictly limited checking of quality of service, not to be recorded and, not to be censored.

There are even privacy laws in place to protect employees from excess invasions of privacy, let alone customers and of course non-customers, those people the customers are communicating with who have no connection with the company providing telecommunication services.