Australian ISPs Must Hand Over Pirates' Info

wabrandsma sends this report from the BBC: An Australian court has ordered internet service providers to hand over details of customers accused of illegally downloading a U.S. movie. In a landmark move, the Federal Court told six firms to divulge names and addresses of those who downloaded The Dallas Buyers Club. ... The court said the data could only be used to secure "compensation for the infringements" of copyright. In the case, which was heard in February, the applicants said they had identified 4,726 unique IP addresses from which their film was shared online using BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing network. They said this had been done without their permission. Once they received the names of account holders, the company would then have to prove copyright infringement had taken place.

Comments

Re:What I want to know is...

[GumphMaster]

The Voltage Pictures VP of Royalties was interviewed on the radio as I drove home today. He said that Voltage is doing this because a small producer they cannot cannot cross-subsidise from other parts of the business to cover the losses due to infringing copies of their movies (His argument was clearly based on the assumption that every infringing copy is a lost sale). The big players can afford to do this and see the negative press as more costly than the potential increase in revenue. He refused to be drawn on what they would be demanding from the alleged infringers. There were also some poor choices of words, assumption of guilt, and sense that they are the law.

Read (http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/stories/s4212674.htm) or listen (http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/daily/hack_wed_2015_4_8.mp3) to the show.