“In a definitive defeat for film studios – and in a first case of its kind worldwide – Australia’s Federal Court has ruled that ISPs have no obligation to act on copyright infringement notices or to disconnect subscribers after receiving multiple letters. If copyright holders want justice for illegal file-sharing, they need to start by targeting the right people: those who committed the infringement.”
I am glad people are standing up to the bullying tactics by Studios that try to gloss over matters such as proving infringement in a court of law. And I find it sad watching archaic business models grasping at straws.
Yup, I see this same rhetoric on Ars Technica (the site where this article originated) all the time. At least one or two pro-piracy articles go up on that site every day. And of course, they cried when Pirate Bay was shut down.
Quite surprisingly, they have a subscription service on the site where you can pay to access premium content. Problem is, anything you try to charge for that can be reproduced millions of times for $0 is, to some, also part of that archaic business model.
Wonder how they would feel if their copyrighted material were downloaded and shared with a few million people? After all, that’s just like buying a CD and sharing it with a friend, right? You don’t suppose they would have a problem with that, would you? Or would they wake up and realize how much it sucks to be on the receiving end of copyright theft?
Edited 2010-02-05 03:53 UTC
I’m not in favor of theft of any type, but I’m glad at least some countries are standing up to the studios–some of which, I dare to say, seem to act as though they are above the law entirely. I do not believe the movie studios should be the top authority in this, as they seem to want. ISPs should *not* be answerable to the studios, especially when such monitoring is the domain of law enforcement. That’s why I’m happy about this ruling even though I’m not an Australian. It’s not about promoting piracy, it’s about keeping power in check and in the right authorities. We’d all better pray to some higher power or other if the movie industry ever gets the power they really want. I’d suggest reading the Acts of Caine series by Matthew Stover, the future earth depicted there is based exactly on the concept of the ultimate authority being vested in the studios, and I don’t think it’s too far off from what we’d get if this ever actually came to be given their current draconian views.
So, good call for Australia. Nice to see some countries have a bit of sense when it comes to these matters.
It doesn’t matter of your pro-piracy or not, the traditional big business music industry is becoming obsolete and this doesn’t only happen because of piracy. This is covered in depth elsewere but it basically boils down to:
* It’s much easier to have your music distributed world wide these days without the need of a gigantic distribution chain.
* You can create much higher quality music with less cost these days
* The CD is basically in it’s decline and portable lossy and lossless formats is where it’s at. For those you don’t need any huge CD plants and you don’t need to spend millions on pressing CD’s.
Lets end with relating to the topic at hand. Is the post office responsible for people sending, say, pirated copies of books in parcels?
Edited 2010-02-05 06:01 UTC
Big business isn’t going nowhere it has so much advantages over small business.
However this would mean much higher management and legal costs than using gigantic distributors. Most likely big business companies will just move to digital world and dominate it.(Look iTunes) Also most artist don’t have enough resources to get there stuff promoted enough so big business will take care them.
Studios cost, good producers cost, payed musicians cost, promoting costs, management, booking and legals cost. CD planting and distribution is just small drop in ocean. Take look todays biggest stars, they have huge costs on each album making.
Post parcels are protected by different law. However ISPs in some countries already filter child pornographic material, this already breaks net neutarility and makes them hypocrities.
well, since we’re going to use emotionally charged examples to make our points, ISP shouldn’t be doing any mandated traffic snooping in the first place. It should be good old fashion police work for copyright enforcement and child abuse. Neither the ISP nor RIAA should be the enforcement authority.
Importing something as despicable as child abuse to make your point about copyright only serves to make an emotional plee. “oh won’t someone think of the children”
(and don’t seriously suggest that by not supporting ISP snooping that I somehow endorse abuse)
They probably wouldn’t like it. But they wouldn’t sue AT&T, Bell, AOL, Time Warner, Road Runner etc (sorry if some of them aren’t ISP’s … I’m from Australia!) for providing internet access.
They would sue the person reading the copyright stolen material, or more logically the host of the copyright breached content who is “making available” the content without permission.
The movie studios, through an Australian agency, were suing the ISP for providing internet access, not the torrent tracker / torrent search engine / person downloading the breached material.
To date, nobody has actually even proved that the material they claim was breaching their copyright, was actuall breaching their copyright.
The ISP did the correct thing. An allegation of an illegal act was given to them, they forwarded every allegation to the law enforcement to investigate.
The police felt there was no illegal act / insufficient evidence, and did not request more details from the ISP to investigate the end users.
Are you saying gun manufacturers should be charged with murder if someone shoots another person with one of their guns?
Or perhaps an auto manufacturer should be charged when a drunk kills a family on his way home from a bar?
Or better still, the iron ore miner should be charged as he provided the raw material for both guns and cars.
How is that a pro-piracy sentiment? The underlying reasoning seems to be that, if you consider the current film/TV/music/literature distribution models to be archaic, then it’s assumed that you’re an eyepatch-wearing pirate with an aversion to paying for anything.
Speaking for myself, I’m perfectly willing to pay for content – the problem is that none of the big content producers/distributors provide a service that I consider worth paying for. I purchased several season subscriptions back when Red vs. Blue was still “airing,” giving me access to download high-res copies of each episode, for a flat per-seasons fee. And yet I can’t do the same with LOST (without breaking the law, at least).
When a group of half a dozen geeks (RoosterTeeth, the people who made RVB) can conceive of and implement a better distribution model than multi-billion dollar multi-nationals, how could you possibly conclude that the latter group’s business model is *not* archaic?
How is that comparable? Last I checked, the PDFs are just print versions of the same content they provide freely on the website.
The original comment suggested happiness for a rational decision out of a court of law (obviously, not a US court). They also expressed disappointment at the ineffective and draconian way they go about trying to protect there products. How is that promoting infringement or even relevant to what articles a completely different website posts?
There is a difference between promoting copyright infringement and being critical of things like DMCA or how the media companies behave.
Edited because the quote function does not seem to be working:
—————
The RIAA/MPAA and any other ??AA can all collectively go sniff a cat.
I do not pirate content. I support authors and others who create content. I don’t like the studios telling me I can’t move the content I have purchased from one device to another. I don’t like them telling me I can’t back up the content I have purchased and I don’t like the idea they can have my internet shut off just by calling my ISP and telling them that I might be the person who downloaded one file.
I can see them having peoples internet shut off just because they posted something they don’t like. If they want to cut off my internet, they can take their evidence to court where I can defend myself.
Edited 2010-02-09 08:49 UTC
ISP Can’t Be Forced to Play Copyright Cop in Australia
Fixed that for you.
Nowhere in the article does it mention that this ruling applies anywhere else.
And nowhere was it implied otherwise. The first sentence of the article states it was the Australian Federal Court. Or are you trying to imply that every bit of contextual information about an article needs to exist in the title?
In any case, you’d have to be naive to think this ruling won’t be reviewed and referenced elsewhere in the world. This has the potential to be the start of a big shift and I’m personally hoping this decision gets applied elsewhere, especially the United States (where I live).
Requiring ISPs to police Internet traffic on their networks is like requiring residents to police the traffic on roads that pass their house. It would be an entirely different matter if an ISP was hosting the offending material.
I forgot to add this to my post directly above.
In Australia, ISP’s are charged quite hefty rates for bringing data across the world to our interconnects in Sydney/Perth.
ISP’s in Australia, on the whole, hate downloads from the US, UK, Asia etc because it costs them a fortune in international bandwidth.
They would very much prefer the studio’s to licence the work for online distribution, so they can transfer the data once into their data centres, then mirror the traffic locally. It’s much cheaper than having 100 customers bittorrent a movie, where a large portion of each file is downloaded from international locations.
iiNet are certainly not saving money by “turning a blind eye” to customers who may be breaching copyright. They would save much more money by hosting mirrors of large sites, such as Akamai, iTunes store etc (which they already do, to save lots of money in international transit costs).
They have the equipment and expertise to locally mirror pretty much any online store the studio’s want to create. It’s just about price and DRM that customers feel are excessive, thereby creating a “justification” for them to “steal”. Not to mention movies being released overseas months before release here on DVD/iTunes etc.
As an iiNet customer in Oz, it’s reassuring to know our legal system hasn’t been completely sold out to private interests just yet and common sense occasionally prevails! Who’da thunk it…
“ISP’s in Australia, on the whole, hate downloads from the US, UK, Asia etc because it costs them a fortune in international bandwidth.”
Trust me (looks at iiNET bill), ISPs are happy to pass this expense to customers. This may sound jaded, but if the studios had won this legal battle iiNET would probably have seen a 50%+ reduction in profits from users jumping ship or adjusting their bandwidth deals (out of principle, of course). So iiNET’s very existence is in jeopardy.
But we are far from out of the woods and we can’t expect the studios not to do an end run with their lobbying.
On a related issue, when/if the censorship/filtering laws come into effect in Australia, craftily after the next election, ISPs will see a further reduction in users/bandwidth. Make no mistake, ISPs and the internet users of Australia are under attack.
This legal outcome gives us Australians some hope, but when the government starts up their censorship regime, we will be seen as a tech backwater that we have desperately fought to not be perceived as, and all IT investment in this country will dry up. (And rightly so). It will serve themselves right.