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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.
BitTorrent is a file synchronization protocol you insensitive clod. You assume slashdot readers need to be told what it is, and then you get it wrong by saying it's a file-sharing network.
I don't get it... you all know networks like I2P, Phantom, Freenet, GNUnet, Tor, MaidSafe, Retroshare, and even CJDNS exist and are effectively bulletproof and a final FUCK YOU to the MAFIAA..... but you refuse to use them. Did you know that some like Phantom, Tor with Onioncat and CJDNS can even support your favorite sharing/torrent apps directly over native and private IPV6? Did you know you can download both a full lossless raw DVD-9 VOB rip and a lossless FLAC CD rip per day?
Yet like idiots with their heads you STILL continue to insist on using clearnet and complaining when the MAFIAA comes for you.
What a bunch of moronic internet masses you all are.
I'd tell the US to go fuck themselves.
I'm so glad to be living in Australia at this time.
Last week we get news that the government is forcing all ISP's to retain metadata information for all usage by all subscribers 'coz of terrorists'. Now we get news that the current data ISP's have, which is only supposed to be used for billing issues, is being used to identify and sue subscribers who had their IP in a torrent tracker 2 years ago!. No Movie studio my IP appearing in a tracker doesn't mean that I'm downloading or seeding your video. It just means someone possibly is using my IP to view who else is connected to that tracker. Or maybe the tracker randomly puts generated ips in the list to mess with you. Or maybe I allow my neighbors to use my internet or the public as they walk their dogs in a nearby park. Should I be held liable for them viewing publicly accessible information (the torrents tracker list)? Or should torrent tracker administrators be suing you for stealing their customer information? Couldn't this be considered hacking (accessing unauthorized information?)?
I hope this keeps up. Next week we will all be hearing about how to access the internet you must use your australia.gov login.
Since it's bittorrent, they aren't "merely downloading" because it is automatically sharing the (partial) download with others at the same time -- meaning that they're uploading as well. Since the average user doesn't have the right to (re)distribute the movie in question, they are violating the copyright of the owners.
Since when is merely downloading something an offense? I think the article is most likely full of shit.
Sadly since the conservative government took power in late 2013 they've had a hard on for helping out big business in any way possible. As such we've gotten new draconian laws and signed secret treaties giving away any rights they couldn't take away. Its not like the Abbott government cares about being unpopular. In the mean time, I'm just going to get a seedbox and recommend other Aussies do the same.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Australia has a different body of law which provides different rights and obligations, a different court system, and different precedents. What might have failed in the US court system may succeed in Australia's court system. That is neither right or wrong, but it does mean that similar facts can result in different outcomes in different locales. Different political entities often reflect different values and priorities in their laws. The US has the 1st and 2nd Amendments to its Constitution which provides greater protections in those areas than most countries. On the other hand Europe has stronger data protection laws tied to the individual's rights. Australia has many fine points of its own.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I am sure that the plaintiff in this case would dearly love to engage in "speculative invoicing" and to do that they need somewhere to send a legal threat with a nice "make it go away for only $2000" clause. The judge has at least considered this, so the plaintiff must pass any correspondence destined for the parties revealed here through the court. That should at least control the extraction of money by threat of legal action with no intent to proceed to actual litigation. My guess is that the plaintiff will try to ID one or two endpoints that look like a business/individual with reasonable sized pockets and try to set a precedent with them.
This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Why all the stories I hear about mass-lawsuits over piracy seem to be for crappy films like Dallas Buyers Club and that Hurt Locker thing.
Why hasn't Warner Bros filed a mass-lawsuit over piracy of the new Hobbit film? Or what about a lawsuit from Universal over the latest Fast & Furious film.
I am sure there are films out there that have been pirated a LOT more than Dallas Buyers Club (a film I hadn't even heard of before the lawsuit showed up) so why aren't we seeing these kinds of mass lawsuits on those films? (or if those lawsuits do happen, how come they dont get as much attention as the ones we hear about like this Dallas Buyers Club film?)
Not to excuse the disgrace that is Abbott, but the reason this got pushed through is because BOTH SIDES supported this legislation. Labor have had a hardon for getting internet censorship in for years and had repeated failed attempts while they were in government. It is truly sad that now both sides have sunk to this level.
The article is about Australia, so no, there was no need 15 years ago or even last week.
We have a crime here called "demanding money with menaces" (or similar) that covered speculative invoicing. Without proof from an ISP a person that sent out demands for money while claiming to represent a copyright holder was at risk of serving jail time. A business set up here, with a lot of fanfare, just two years ago in the hope of getting all that "MAFIAA" money folded without sending out a single notice for that reason.
Here the legal system still sees copyright infringement as a civil and not criminal matter. Thus it sees shakedown letters as being a far more serious matter than filesharing Breaking Bad. That is changing as a serious of court challenges, like the current one, are spamming our legal system. The current one is the first that "worked" as far as the "MAFIAA" as you call them would see it.