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New Anti-Piracy Law In Australia Already Being Abused (abc.net.au)
Gumbercules!! writes: A small Australian ISP has received a demand that it block access to an overseas website or face legal action in the Federal Court, in a case in which a building company is demanding the ISP block access to an overseas site with a similar name. This case is being seen as a test case, potentially opening the way for companies and aggregated customers to use the new anti-piracy laws to block access to companies or their competition. The ISP in question has obviously been selected because they're very small and have limited financial capacity to fight a legal case.
Damn those aggregated customers they can be so....aggregating!
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The whole point of this is to avoid going after the correct organizations that have laws and lawyers on their side and instead get what you want via a backdoor opened by this law that allows you to go after the smaller fish that don't have the resources to fight your will in court and then, once you have the court judgement, you can use it to browbeat the larger players into submission without ever having to challenge them in court directly as they were never a party to the original claim but, the judgement will apply to them anyway. It's a dirty trick that I'm sure was put in this law by design as large players such as ICANN and Google have been very successful at fighting off claims like this in court. Now they will be able to get court orders against them without ever having to directly face them. No one can believably claim that this is an "accidental" legal loophole provided by the law. It was just obfuscated enough to get it past the general public without much of a fight.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
If you go to the infringing site you might get the impression that this is the Australian builder. It is not. Scroll to the bottom and the contact info is in India. The actual Simonds Homes is something else.
Looks like deceptive practice on the part of CHM Constructions. What can Simonds do to defend itself?
You seem to have misunderstood the whole argument: it's not about needing a huge horde of lawyers to win a case because they can magically come up with the most logical arguments, rather, it's about the one with the larger team and more resources often being able to draw the fight on for so long that you'll incur some severe drop in your financials and even possibly going bankcrupt. The one with limited resources often has no choice but to just accept the other one's demands as they never would have the money to be able to fight the thing to conclusion. Also, court cases rarely come down to the party with the most logical argument winning and instead they often come down to which party can find the most favourable loopholes or past judgements, and for those a larger team is definitely an advantage.
Worse than that, this is a law designed for copyright being abused for some idiot to try to enforce his trademark by claiming a company in another country is somehow infringing.
This site is not anywhere near "the primary purpose of the online location is to infringe, or to facilitate the infringement of, copyright".
This has nothing to do with copyright.
This is exactly what happens when you put the onus of policing these things onto the fucking ISPs.
The ONLY way this should work is companies go to a court, prove their case, and then the court say "OK, block this". If the law is so badly written it can be used by a company to bully an ISP into doing something the law isn't intended to do .. then the law is terribly written.
Essentially the law was written that each ISP has to be the defender of any site they are asked to block, or will just blindly block them out of sheer laziness.
And, once again, the copyright cartels have bought themselves a law which allows them to do anything they wish, with no consequences, and shift the cost of keeping things in check onto others. Any law which allows people to make copyright claims without proving them has been designed to pander to one industry at the expense of every other industry.
Now, apparently, you can just claim copyright infringement, and be able to do that for free and make it someone else's problem.
This is what happens when you let companies write their own damned laws in such a way that they can do anything. From the sounds of it, this law was intentionally written as to allow copyright holders as much leeway as possible ... which means it's an utterly useless law.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What should be happening is the company who wants to issue the takedown has to go to court and prove their assertions, and then the court tells the ISP to add it to the list.
But, since this is a copyright related law, the people who bought it didn't want any pesky burden of proof, so it's written in such a way that the ISP is responsible for defending the content.
Take the ISP out of the equation until the court has ruled. Otherwise all you're really doing is allowing someone to make an unsubstantiated demand, and having that be someone else's problem.
It's time we stopped giving copyright laws such wide room for interpretation and abuse, and make the people who want to claim infringement have some actual standard of providing proof and showing how the content is actually infringing.
Right now they have bought themselves the right to say anything they want, with no burden of proof, and no consequences for being wrong or outright lying.
That's an utterly insane law, because it lets them just make up anything they want to, and it's others who have to comply.
Imagine if I could go to the police and say you stole my car .. and they will come and take your car and give it to me, and then you have to prove that it was actually your car.
This is a law which essentially assumes the accuser is in the right, and the accused must prove their innocence. And, make no mistake, this law is written like this by design, because in all likelihood the people who wrote it are the people who paid for it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It was just obfuscated enough to get it past the general public without much of a fight.
This was negotiated in secret, the governments deliberately acted to prevent the public from knowing in advance what was going to be imposed on them. Large companies were let in on the negotiations which is why it contains clauses to help the screw the public and small business.
Did anybody not expect this? The real question now is whether this will get worse or whether judges and lawmakers will grow brains
If I am an Australian PC Maker, I should quickly form a company under a shell corp, register www.dwell.com, then file a claim against Dell stating they are infringing on my name and block access to the site.....
Just brilliant.
It was just obfuscated enough to get it past the general public without much of a fight.
This was negotiated in secret, the governments deliberately acted to prevent the public from knowing in advance what was going to be imposed on them. Large companies were let in on the negotiations which is why it contains clauses to help the screw the public and small business.
Much like the TPP, then. How comforting to see such consistency, especially from the Australian government.
Except pretty much every government is doing this, because apparently these days the entire function of governments establishing laws and treaties is to enshrine in law the protection of corporate profits.
Pretty much every treaty I've seen mentioned in the last bunch of years expands copyright, places the burden of policing copyright onto someone else, is negotiated in secret, and can really only be described as undermining our rights for the benefit of corporations.
Governments no longer represent citizens, they represent the interests of multi-national corporations. And as a result, they time after time pass laws which really only benefit multi-national corporations.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Section 115A didn't exist in 1968, therefore the letter of claim is incorrect and probably unenforceable in the federal court.
The problem is, this law will affect "normal" people. You can only silence what the majority doesn't use. Silencing dissent requires you to do it in a way that doesn't keep people from getting their Lolcats.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The point isn't that lawyers can turn black into white provided they're expensive enough. The point is that this small ISP can't simply drag out the case 'til nobody gives a shit anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the demand letter, Simond's actually quotes the appropriate legal action that they should be taking: Get an injunction. Simonds undoubtedly recognizes that their case for a copyright injunction is weak and is trying for an end run by running over s small ISP with hopes of using their acquiescence as a tool to enlist more ISP's. Look at the CHM site, I get why Simond's is fighting mad. So they're beating up the nearest 98 pound weakling they can find in an effort to "do something NOW"
The content cartels have been trying to push the bullshit "Intellectual Property" term for quite some time; obfuscating whether a claim is a patent, copyright or trademark. They have been trying to create an umbrella "protection" for content that is as loose on requirements as trademarks, length of copyrights (or longer) and with the legal enforcement powers of patents (or more). Their wet dream is to be able to claim anything as "IP" with an unlimited term and even more enforcement powers than currently allowed with patents because they are trying to get it where they can send the police after you on their word alone without a judge overseeing them with no appeal process. Some of this was rammed into the TPP but, not all of it. They keep using the slow boiling pot method to try and move this through without people fighting it. They tried pushing this stuff through much faster and in larger pieces and it always backfired. Secret negotiations and votes seem to be a common tactic now, bending the laws of a lot of countries to keep them hidden from the public until it is too late. In short, the corporations are trying to create a system where they own everything and you have to pay monopoly rates to them in perpetuity because you have no other choice as no one is ever allowed to compete with them.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Blocking access to the site from Australia probably won't make a whole lot of difference, because the real reputational damage might arise elsewhere. Simonds need to get the site shut down or amended.
The most obvious way to do this would be to file a DMCA complaint. "But wait," you say ,"neither party is in the US!" True - but chmconstructions.com is hosted in the US, and all the major search engines are *also* hosted in the US, do they *do* have to comply with a DMCA complaint. In my opinion, there is sufficient copied material on the Indian site to justify a DMCA complaint. And you don't even need to get lawyered up for that.
The other way to do it is to hire a law firm in INDIA and threaten legal action over there. Indian lawyers are not expensive, but in my personal experience in a similar case.. they are of highly variable quality. Probably better than the Ozzie lawyers Simonds hired though. But if you actually want to *do* something about the problem, then India is the place to go.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Hooray for Hollywood used to mean something positive. Now it refers to the copyright industry destroying the Internet bit by bit. Anyone thinking that Australia decided to do this all by themselves without massive pressure from the US Gov't = USTR = Hollywood, please read up.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Perhaps we should put claims against the content cartel's sites. I think that NBC.com is stealing my copyrighted material for their own profit, they should be blocked by the ISPs for their terrible temerity of stealing my intellectual property!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
what's wrong with adopting a more colloquially informal conversational style on a message forum
Yes they have a very good case against CHM Constructions... not against the ISP though... and they're suing the ISP not the foreign company.
A company in Australia has a very good case against a company in India?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The name of an act doesn't change just because it's amended.
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With the way the copyright section is written copyright rulings in one jurisdiction will be applied in others. It doesn't apply in this case since it's blocking at the ISP. But having something called a copyright infringement in Australia lets a company go to a Canadian ISP and have content taken down even if it doesn't infringe on copyright in Canada.
In this case the Australian company should have just filed a complaint with ICAAN to get the domain moved to them as the Indian company was obviously trying to make the site look like the Australian company.
They found a weak government that was only interested in slogans and keeping the other party out of power. A soft target for them.
That's using an elephant gun to kill a pissant.
Here in the states, we get this kind of shit all the time.
Being grown-up Internet users, we just put up with the bullshit and ignore it.
We get IRS scams (you owe us or we take all your money), phishing scams (your email has been compromised, sign on using our link), the UPS package you (didn't even) sent has an invoice problem; open the attached invoice ...
Lots of companies pretend to be legitimate and we've learned to tell the difference.
You don't need to bring down a goddam ISP for this shit.
All it takes is a little education on the part of the people who are the targets of scams.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It wasn't intentional. I just used that many words to get that particular thought out. After the comments, I even went back and re-read it and thought to myself "how the hell did I do that?"
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -