Mass Piracy Lawsuits Come To Australia

daria42 writes "Remember when the RIAA started sending tens of thousands of letters to Americans who it had alleged had infringed copyright online, trying to get them all to settle out of court? Yeah, good times. Well that style of mass-lawsuit has now arrived in Australia, courtesy of a new company which dubs itself the 'Movie Rights Group.' The company is currently seeking to obtain details of at least 9,000 Australians it alleges has infringed copyright on one film, and it has a number of other films in the pipeline. Sounds like a good time to know an IP lawyer."

Comments

That's because it's summer

[tech4]

It's not really surprising. Almost always anti-piracy groups start making noise when summer is starting. Feels like they're trying to scare off kids.

Re:That's because it's summer

[planimal]

also, aussies are upside down, all their blood is in their feet, their water is demonic and vortexes in the wrong direction, and they aren't actually people.

Re:That's because it's summer

[sjdaniels]

also, aussies are upside down, all their blood is in their feet, their water is demonic and vortexes in the wrong direction, and they aren't actually people.

Yep.! And we have kangaroos hopping down the street and are all related to Paul Hogan. !!

Re:That's because it's summer

[digitig]

"When we went to Australia, people told us that they have winter at a different time to us. It turns out that they have winter at the same time as us, it's just that we have another one from October to March." -- Michael Flanders (or was it Donald Swann?)

Re:With any luck

[causality]

these "Movie Rights Group" parasites will get the rough treatment from the courts that they deserve.

Failing that, the Australian people can turn to a time-tested method of dealing with assholes: tar and feather them. Then post the videos all over the Internet. With a Creative Commons license.

Hmmmm....

[girlintraining]

Comment EULA:

By reading this comment, you agree to be bound by the terms listed herein; If you are a member, employee, associate, business partner, or affiliate of the RIAA or MPAA, you owe me one million ($1,000,000.00) USD, payable in full immediately. Thanks to your f*cked up interpretation of the law, this is, in fact, perfectly legal. Any attempt to evade this legally binding contract will be grounds for me to sue you at three times the requested amount, waive your right to a trial, and hold me utterly and totally immune to any form of legal challenge by you and/or your employer, until at least 150 years after my timely and natural death. Everybody else... I love 'ya. Stay awesome.

Re:Hmmmm....

[bryan1945]

Until you come back as a zombie and reclaim your copyright. Hmm, I wonder if being undead and walking around is cause for an automatic renewal of the time frame for claiming copyright? Same thing if they reanimated Walt Disney's head a la Futurama.

Arrr!

[coolstoryhansel]

Join an organisation like the Pirate Party and help advocate for changes in the law. This sort of predatory litigation is only going to get worse because the law enables it.

As an Australian and an Author...

[Sasayaki]

I'm in the process of writing a book, called Lacuna: Demons of the Void, seen here. The first three chapters are available for free, and are CC-BY-SA-NC; this means that you can legally and safely write whatever fanfiction you want, or pass the sample chapters around, or change and remix them or do whatever you want basically as long as you don't sell it, don't change the licence and credit me appropriately.

I did this because if the book (and subsequent sequels if any) gets popular, I didn't want to get old and fat and retarded and turn into the next George Lucas, grabbing hold of my precious precious IP and never letting go.

Anyway.

Regarding piracy, I wrote on my webpage:

First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.

Real pirates, like those guys in Somalia, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.

I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.

I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?

Fuck those guys.

I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). If you make $15 Aussie dollars an hour, minimum wage, then $2 represents about eight minutes of your time. If you spent more than eight minutes bringing up the highly overloaded Pirate Bay page, finding a correct torrent, loading the torrent into uTorrent, downloading the file, moving it around on your NAS, putting it into iTunes, getting the book's coverart then syncing it to your iPhone, then yeah you pretty much just robbed yourself.

Just saying. You're probably saving money by buying it vs pirating it, since time=money. LOL. This is why CD's shouldn't be so fucking expensive.

But hey, a lot people have genuine and interesting philosophical beliefs against paying for services rather than physical objects ("it's just bits, man! You can't own bits...!"). Other people are unemployed (or underemployed) and couldn't afford the book anyway. How both these types have high-speed internet is a mystery for the ages, but for those people, well, go forth and torrent... I don't care. I just ask that if you believe all that crazy crap and do like the book, then subsequently you think I deserve some kind of reward for creating it, I beg you not to compromise your principles. Instead, just donate $2 (or whatever) to Child's Play, run by the infinitely-more-talented-than-me dynamic duo of

Re:As an Australian and an Author...

[rudy_wayne]

If you make $15 Aussie dollars an hour, minimum wage, then $2 represents about eight minutes of your time. If you spent more than eight minutes bringing up the highly overloaded Pirate Bay page, finding a correct torrent, loading the torrent into uTorrent, downloading the file, moving it around on your NAS, putting it into iTunes, getting the book's coverart then syncing it to your iPhone, then yeah you pretty much just robbed yourself.

Just saying. You're probably saving money by buying it vs pirating it, since time=money. LOL.

Time = money is only true when you paying someone. If you are paying someone $15 per hour, then yes, 8 minutes is worth $2. However, when you are sitting at home and not getting paid then 8 minutes of your time, or 8 hours, or 8 days, is worth exactly zero.

Re:As an Australian and an Author...

[gweihir]

+1, insightful

Time = money works only to a certain extend, but is still a good rule of thumb. I have used it for a long time to decide whether something was worth my money.

The only exceptions I remember at the moment are DVDs and CDs that I cannot copy on my computer or (as in the case of some music CDs) that I cannot play on my computer. Or that have horribly long and annoying unskippable advertising and threats when played.Bad usability is a mood-killer and far more expensive than the time it consumes. So is insulting the customer on video.

I do have to admit that I did not get the music I could not play from the net. I just dropped the artists entirely.

I do something else some people may consider "criminal" or "amoral": Whenever ads on web-pages are animated or otherwise annoying, they go into my ad-blocker.

Re:As an Australian and an Author...

[Kjella]

Time = money is only true when you paying someone. If you are paying someone $15 per hour, then yes, 8 minutes is worth $2. However, when you are sitting at home and not getting paid then 8 minutes of your time, or 8 hours, or 8 days, is worth exactly zero.

Assuming you got nothing better you wanted to do, then being able to do that instead is worth something to you. At least my non-work time can be divided into chores and leisure and generally I'd be willing to pay to have less of the former and more of the latter. Everything you do also has an opportunity cost, could you something more productive with your time? If you could work one more hour for $10 in post-tax income then spend one hour less bargain-hunting increasing your expenses by $5, you come out ahead if we assume both are things you equally dislike doing.

Of course this depends on the financial situation you're in. If you can't work overtime or find more work then your income is fixed, then you might put extreme value on living cheaper even it takes a lot of time. Other times you may work plenty overtime and make good money and be extremely willing to pay so your time off really is time off. Your real sensitivity depends more on how badly you need the money rather than how much you get paid.

I could make this a lot more complex since you got degrees of wanting and not wanting to do things, some things are time-sensitive like having time off on weekends when my buddies also have time off and so on but it'd only confuse the picture. You can often swap money for time and time for money and sometimes by making combinations you can come out ahead both in time and money. Many people only want to see savings, not savings/time or savings less costs like driving across town to buy it.

No one in Oz drinks Fosters

[mjwx]

legal BS Foster's Australian for Beer.

No one in Australia drinks Fosters, that is only for export.

Nothing is too bad for the rest of the world.

In all seriousness, it's not even brewed here in Oz any more, Heiniken International owns the license so it's not even owned by Fosters Group any more. The last time I saw a Fosters was in Singapore. I had the choice between Fosters, Pure Blonde or some local brew I'd never heard of, I took the local brew.

Re:History lesson

[causality]

You forgot "jury". It goes between "ballot" and "ammo". Although the same egomaniacs who must have control have largely ruined the jury box.

Jury nullification is mostly unknown these days. It's a final check against tyrannical laws. But in the USA it's not mentioned to those who serve on juries. That wasn't always the case at all.

Now it's more like a technical procedure where every step has nice, neat, clear instructions. The idea that the jury is a way to refuse enforcement of a law one feels is unjust or tyrannical is not officially allowed or endorsed anymore.

I'd argue that the ballot box is mostly irrelevant at the federal level, but can be truly important at the state and local levels. It's not a matter of the candidate for which one should vote. It's a matter of how an unknown person gets to become a famous political candidate, the financial and political support it takes for this to happen, the even larger levels of support it takes to win, and who gets to receive such support. That machine determines elections far more than ballots.

Voting doesn't mean very much when all available candidates are part of the same system. This is an inevitable outcome of a system where the "common person" would never achieve high office. It boils down to something other than merit and personal achievement. Those have been replaced with cronyism, corruption, and cynacism.

The most effective box these days is the soap box. The Internet is something different. Bullshit ideas actually have to defend their merits. It's not like TV with its unilateral, one-to-many nature. The soap box available to the average person has never been bigger or more powerful.

This could get interesting

[dbIII]

Here the crime of "demanding money with menaces" could probably be laid on these guys if they have some sort of autobot making threats demanding money instead of demanding that you turn up in court (with an option to settle). Rememebr SCO? They were relatively quiet in Australia because if people gave into their demands and they sold one bogus linux licence somebody at SCO Australia may have ended up doing time. I'm aware of some people that rang SCO to attempt to buy a licence (for entrapment, general mischeif or just to see how far they could get) and they were put off with the end result that SCO didn't sell any linux licences in Australia.
Judges really hate lazy lawyers and the idea of spam autobot legal threats on slim evidence is likely to piss them off enough to really want to hurt these guys as much as possible. It will be interesting to see when it happens.

Re:On a Side Note

[papafox_too]

On a related side note, Pirate Bay has been unreachable all evening.

TPB's main feed Serious Tube Networks (based in Stockholm) 194.68.0.0/24 AS50066 seems to be blocked. Could be hardware/config issue or it could be deliberate.

Re:One flaw.

[Sasayaki]

Correct, except that "after hours time" is generally the working person's most valuable commodity, especially for people earning above minimum wage. That's why, especially for something so cheap, I reckon it's just cheaper to pay the small cost and have those couple of minutes back. That's why people have super-fast internet, why they eat fast food, and why they grumble about the commute to and from work -- because a few minutes here and there does add up.

Plus, buying the book legitimately means that if I issue updates or special features (such as alternate endings, or short stories, or whatever) those come through automagically.

Which movie?

[Macgrrl]

If over 9,000 people downloaded it, maybe it's worth a watch. Gimmie a sec to fire up NZB.

Re:Which movie?

[Macgrrl]

Hrm... I should have RTFA, the film was Kill the Irishman

I don't recall the film being released down here, though if it was, it was only a very small number of screens. Chances are it's yet another example of Aussies downloading content not yet available in this market because Hollywood still thinks it's a good idea to do regional staggered releases in these days of digital 'prints'.

Re:Which movie?

[thegarbz]

Chances are it's yet another example of Aussies downloading content not yet available in this market because Hollywood still thinks it's a good idea to do regional staggered releases in these days of digital 'prints'.

How about films that don't even get shown like Submarine. Now here's a film that came out more than a year ago at the film festivals around the world, and generally was released in March and June in the UK / US respectively. It showed in Australia last month ... in New South Wales. We did a lot of digging and found one independent cinema in my state was showing this film which we've heard rave reviews about. It was showing the film on weekdays at 2pm.

I would have happily paid to see the film. I would have happily paid a premium to see the film at an independent cinema in the city. But I was simply not given that option.

Re:Which movie?

[dbIII]

Another one was Princess Mononoko (Disney released the English version) which took ten years before a single sold out showing at a film festival in Australia and twelve before it had an actual cinema release (one screen in one city, probably about eight weeks).

Re:With any luck

[TapeCutter]

Aussie's already have a time-tested method of dealing with these parasites, we ignore them. Downloading copyright material is NOT illegal in Australia and this new front group will have as much success as AFACT has had in the past when it has tried the same thing; a few ISP's will pass on the letter, no ISP will give out customer information (it's illegal to do so without a court order, good luck getting one), not one individual has ever been sued.

Re:With any luck

[TapeCutter]

You have a problem in the US which the MAFIAA have tried and failed to import to Oz. This new group are not doing anything that AFACT hasn't been doing for years, so it's kinda silly to expect anything other than failure.

PS: Australia's economy is in great shape.

Real world Example of how this is BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I please give an example of how this is complete BS.

IP Address does not equal a Person or Company.

This is a real world example. We get repairs in from customers from time to time that have uTorrent running while the computer is booting, it is sometimes seeding a file or what have you. We have all of these either plugged in via ethernet or wireless as we have to do a series of checks on the machine (internet, video stress testing etc) to make sure that it is ready to be sent back to avoid other issues that may have arisen. I am sure a lot of you guys are familiar with this being a lot of IT professionals here.

It is not our responsibility to go around and close uTorrent or any other programs that may be running, and some of these machines may be bench tested for 72 hours or so. We deliberately try and not to close these programs as we are trying to test it in a 'real world' scenario so we let the customers programs run how they should be running.

So am I/ The Company liable for inadvertently downloading pirated files or uploading them as well because of our customers software? I don't think so. Nor do i see how successful they would be at prosecuting this.

Good time to BE an IP lawyer...

[chirone]

Sounds like a good time to BE an IP lawyer...

You forgot it's not the US system

[dbIII]

Bribery and conflicts of interest in the Judicary is taken a little more seriously in Australia where it is not an elected post but chosen by existing members of the Judicary - theoretically entirely by merit. It's only the high court that gets appointed by elected officials and they have to choose among existing Judges.
Any barrister that is going to be working for this copyright group is at least a couple of decades away from the high court, and for the sort of corruption you are talking about it has to make it all the way to the high court before it would be effective (otherwise grossly injust decisions get overturned).
We've had a few blatantly corrupt state governments in Australia over the lifetime of the current high court judges and they appear to see a major part of their job as keeping corruption out of the Judicary.

Same in PL

[Dark Lord of Ohio]

In Poland same thing is happening, on pretty large scale, some legal office - Pro Bono (sic), is sending to many internet users in PL letters demanding paying them some amount of money (from $30 to few thousands) and signing an agreement in which that user agrees to pay and, agrees that he/she is guilty of that CRIME and will cease all the illegal activities online (like downloading movies from torrent sites). What is important here is the way how this office obtained users addresses and IPs. Such info is not available to everyone and can be gathered only with courts permission under specific circumstances. That Pro Bono says that it is their KNOW-HOW how they do that, but is it legal?