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

Hmmmm....

[girlintraining]

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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.

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.

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...

[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: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: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.