IInet Subject to Discovery over Illegal Downloading of Dallas Buyers Club
Friday 24 October 2014 @ 1.57 p.m. | IP & Media
iiNet is being taken to the Federal Court by the rights holders of the Oscar-winning "Dallas Buyers Club" to reveal the personal details of customers alleged to have pirated the film.
Background to Filing of Discovery
In a blog post titled ‘Not our kind of club’ iiNet announced Dallas Buyers Club LLC - the owners of rights in the film of the same name - initiated Federal Court legal action in a bid to obtain personal details of some customers who used BitTorrent to download it.
The rights owners, who launched the action 14 October, are seeking as part of a process of preliminary discovery the details of customers linked to IP addresses of BitTorrent users who downloaded the film.
Furthermore, iiNet will oppose the action with the reasoning:
"We don’t support or condone copyright infringement. In fact, our contract terms require that our customers must not use our service to commit an offence or infringe another person’s rights – this includes copyright infringement. We also have a policy that applies to people who infringe the law.
It might seem reasonable for a movie studio to ask us for the identity of those they suspect are infringing their copyright. Yet, this would only make sense if the movie studio intended to use this information fairly, including to allow the alleged infringer their day in court, in order to argue their case.
In this case, we have serious concerns about Dallas Buyers Club’s intentions. We are concerned that our customers will be unfairly targeted to settle any claims out of court using a practice called “speculative invoicing”."
Reaction to iiNet Decision
The move is the latest in a longstanding campaign by entertainment companies to reduce piracy and stem the damage it causes to the multi-billion dollar industry.
iiNet is no stranger to legal action, having won a High Court challenge in 2012 when a group of major US and Australian media companies tried to force it to block customers from downloading pirated content from torrent sites. The High Court, in that action, ruled that ISPs are not able to technically prevent users from downloading film and television programs from torrent services.
The IP Awareness Foundation, a group set up by the film and television content and distribution industry, has commissioned online research that suggests 29 per cent of adults and teenagers regularly access pirated content online.
But Jon Lawrence from internet users rights advocacy group Electronic Frontiers Australia said piracy would decline if film and television companies made their content more easily available:
"We've certainly seen clear evidence from the United States that as services like Netflix, which provides really good content at a reasonable price in a convenient manner, have increased, and the prices have come down, the prevalence of online piracy has come down accordingly."
The Federal Government has also in the past few months been taking submissions for a discussion paper on a legal framework to stem online copyright infringement.
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Attorney-General George Brandis have also suggested internet service providers should take reasonable steps to make sure their customers are not illegally downloading material but have also ramped up their efforts to enable metadata and other information to be collected by telcos at will.
TimeBase is an independent, privately owned Australian legal publisher specialising in the online delivery of accurate, comprehensive and innovative legislation research tools including LawOne and unique Point-in-Time Products.
