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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.
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.
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.
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"