Landmark Ruling Gives Australian ISPs Safe Harbor

omnibit writes "Today, the Federal Court of Australia handed down its ruling in favor of the country's third largest ISP, iiNet. The case was backed by some of the largest media companies, including 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. They accused iiNet of approving piracy by ignoring thousands of infringement notices. Justice Cowdroy said that the 'mere provision of access to internet is not the means to infringement' and 'copyright infringement occurred as result of use of BitTorrent, not the Internet... iiNet has no control over BitTorrent system and [is] not responsible for BitTorrent system.' Many Internet providers had been concerned that an adverse ruling would have forced themselves to police Internet traffic and comply with the demands of copyright owners without any legislative or judicial oversight."

Comments

Re:It was awesome how thoroughly they won too

[Incisa]

The salient quote from the judge - "the law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another".

Users only infringe *once* per file

[tdelaney]

And additional important ruling (taken from the summary):

10. The first step in making a finding of authorisation was to determine whether certain iiNet users infringed copyright. I have found that they have. However, in reaching that finding, I have found that the number of infringements that have occurred are significantly fewer than the number alleged by the applicants. This follows from my finding that, on the evidence and on a proper interpretation of the law, a person makes each film available online only once through the BitTorrent system and electronically transmits each film only once through that system. This excludes the possible case of a person who might repeatedly download the same file, but no evidence was presented of such unusual and unlikely circumstance. Further, I have found, on the evidence before me, that the iiNet users have made one copy of each film and have not made further copies onto physical media such as DVDs.

This appears to be saying that when someone torrents, they only infringe copyright once. Which would make it economically unviable to go after people for casual copyright infringement via the internet, since damages would be severly limited.

The best quote of the ruling

[tick-tock-atona]

To use the rather colourful imagery that internet piracy conjures up in a highly imperfect analogy, the file being shared in the swarm is the treasure, the BitTorrent client is the ship, the .torrent file is the treasure map, The Pirate Bay provides treasure maps free of charge and the tracker is the wise old man that needs to be consulted to understand the treasure map.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2010/24.html

Re:It was awesome how thoroughly they won too

[halcyon1234]

The salient quote from the judge - "the law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another".

It's almost like the judge-- reads? {mindreel}

"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

- Heinlein, Life Line, 1939

Re:Headline should read...

[obeythefist]

As a matter of fact, the Australian judge presiding over this case examined safe-harbour provisions and similar cases from US law and he mentions those examinations in the judgement document.

This is common sense really, as ISP's are a carrier and not liable for the content that passes through their networks.

Unfortunately what will happen is Conroy, the Minister for Communications, who has already identified himself as being strongly pro-copyright, will now attempt to enact harsh laws to force ISPs to surrender private information to AFACT companies and allow direct attacks on the Australian population. Conroy is the same minister who was voted Internet Villain of the Year last year for his ongoing attempts to enact a hidden, government controlled blacklist censorship system to "protect the children" (although really it just blocks political, anti-abortion and euthanasia websites and a few local Australian businesses thrown in at random).