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Dallas Buyers Club Case Struck Down By Federal Court (businessinsider.com.au)
thegarbz writes: After a previous court ruling covered on Slashdot where Dallas Buyers Club was forced to post a $600,000AU bond and accused of speculative invoicing, it appears they have once again failed to make a case for damages in the Australian Federal Court. After asking for a reduced bond of $60,000AU in exchange for details of only 10% of the original alleged pirates, and after dropping the request for punitive damages, Justice Perram concluded that the damages sought were still unrealistic severely limiting the liability of the alleged pirates if the case manages to go ahead. Dallas Buyers Club now has 60 days to respond before the case is terminated.
A bit of context might help to understand the summary without having to play follow-the-link, especially if you only know "Dallas Buyers Club" as a film starring Matthew McConaughey - or don't know of it all.
Dallas Buyers Club LLC is the company that owns the rights to the film (I think) and has been attempting to get the names of ISP users that they believe have been illegally downloading the film, for the purpose of sending them letters demanding payment of a fine to avoid being taken to court (the "speculative invoicing" of the summary).
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's all quite straightforward. The Judge demanded that they ensure the penalties fit the crime basically - and they were unwilling to do so, so he threw it out.
That could be totally wrong, I didn't read the article, I read some twitter summaries (yeah, I know) but that's the jist I got from it.
Reasonable enough, very surprising and fantastic someone applied some common sense.
The first thing to be aware of is that none of this comment is accurate. This case was brought forward before the Metadata act was passed and is completely independent of it. I am not saying that the mandatory storage of metadata is a good thing, it's not, but you make your arguments look stupid if the first line of your argument is completely false.
The Dallas Buyers Club LLC vs iiNet case was lodged in October 2014, the data retention laws were passed in March of 2015 and came in to force in October of 2015. None of the evidence put forward by DBC was provided by the ISPs involved or was in any way retained, accessed, or otherwise related to the metadata laws.
Please feel free to fight these laws and any kind of movement into other countries. But co-opting unrelated events is not the right way.