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A LANDMARK JUDGEMENT has just been handed down in Australia regarding the outing of internet pirates.
Federal Court judge Nye Perram has ruled in favour of Dallas Buyers Club LLC’s application requesting that several different Internet Service Provider’s (ISPs) disclose the identities of people alleged to have shared that movie online.
Effectively, 4,700 people whose service was used to download or share Dallas Buyers Club (for which Matthew McConaughey won a comeback Best Actor Academy Award in 2013) will soon be receiving letters from the aforementioned LLC’s (Limited Liability Company) lawyers threatening legal action.
You may ask why this hasn’t happened more often.
It seems the production company behind the legal action, Voltage Pictures, is setting the standard when it comes to actively pursuing internet piracy.
The company, whose other credits include multi-Oscar winner The Hurt Locker and fellow McConaughey vehicle Killer Joe, have been pursuing individuals who have shared their products via torrent clients like BitTorrent for about two years now.
Most of their movies are produced in the mid-budget range of between €15 million and €35 million.
What’s unusual about their legal actions is that they’ve been getting results.
Most of the individual cases they’ve taken in the last year have been settled for amounts in the region of €3,200 – not a lot of money to a movie distributor perhaps, but a lot to you or I.
Teodor Mitew / TwitterA very important precedent for copyright enforcement in Australia - read the comments and weep http://t.co/gy02CPhPEn #bcm112
— Teodor Mitew (@tedmitew) April 7, 2015
One particularly active file-sharer in Oregon was forced to settle with Voltage for €13,000 in November last year, while another settled for a no-less gulp-inducing €7,000.
The Australian judgement is slightly tempered by the fact the judge has moved to curtail this manner of ‘speculative invoicing’ (i.e. billing those who have broken the law with no frame of reference) by ruling that any letters issued by the LLC must be run by him first.
“Whether speculative invoicing is a lawful practice in Australia is not necessarily an easy matter to assess,” said Justice Perram.
The judge further ruled that the pirates’ identities not be made public.
So the difference between Australia and the US in this case is a question of quantity over quality – that is, Voltage now has access to the particulars of many thousands of pirates, but how they are to prosecute them financially is not yet clear.
So, with all this going on, what is to stop the likes of Voltage from prosecuting Irish file-sharers?
“The difference comes down to the different legal regimes in each territory and their interpretation of privacy,” says Intellectual Property expert Alistair Payne of Irish law firm Matheson, in conversation with TheJournal.ie.
European privacy law is very different from Australian and American law.
It’s chalk and cheese really. Certainly in America they don’t have the same kind of privacy concepts we have here.
So it isn’t possible for a judge to make such a judgement here, or is it not worth the likes of Voltage’s time?
When it comes down to it European law is far more prescriptive than either Australian or American.
Judges here simply don’t have the same leeway to make judgements of this kind, regardless of whether they’d like to or not.
It seems web pirates on this side of the Atlantic can sleep soundly then, for now at any rate.
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Maybe if they put pressure on cinemas to stop bleeding consumers dry this wouldn’t be as much of a problem? They’re going after a symptom instead of the disease causing it.
I’d be in Cineworld more often if it didn’t cost 3 quid for a bottle of water
75% of ticket sales at the cinema go to the movie producers. Hence why popcorn is so expensive
The quality of films in the cinema over the past few years has been shocking. All films are made to the widest possible audience, resulting in a decline in18′s or even 15′s films. Also superheroes all the flippin time! Seriously Antman? Who the flippin flip has heard of Antman? Oh yeah, he’s yet another obscure Marvel or DC character (I don’t flippin care) nobody’s heard of except for maybe one guy who was into comics when he was 12 in America. What’s next Rentboy vs Wonderbra girl?
Less of the language please, think of the children
Rentboy vs Wonderbra gal ain’t out until next summer,I have the pop-up comic for my quiet time.
To be fair, Ant-Man was one of the founding members of the Avengers. He’s also the scientist who created Ultron in the comics, so really he is a massive deal. Just because you’re personally ignorant of who the character is does not mean the rest of the world is the same. If there wasn’t a following they wouldn’t be making a movie about it.
Breaking the law is justified if the only legal means of acquiring a product of leisure is expensive or inconvenient?
I wouldn’t dream of going to the cinema to watch 99% of the crap they are churning out today.
I might even download a movie & simply erase it after 10m. viewing, they are that bad.
Gareth please apologise to Antman and Ultron on my behalf the next time you see them, of all the things to be ignorant on, knowledge of their illustrious history must be one of the worst. You might have slightly missed my general point but ask yourself, have you been to the cinema much in the last couple of years? I remember when I used to work in a cinema, their was about five things on at once that I’d be interested in seeing. Now sadly there’s barely ever anything. I do go and have been to many of these super hero films but really there’s got to be more than just comic books, remakes and sequels!
You can blame the studios there too. They take a massive chunk of ticket sales. Some up to 90%.
The thing is every bit of piracy is not a lost sale, If I think a film is going to be really good I will go see it in the cinema. The ones I download I not have paid to go see anyway, The cinema business is not dying because of piracy, new films still regularly set box office earning records.
What it has killed the DVD industry. And good riddance, the price of them things was ridiculous.
I’m sick of hearing about how
Cinemas make no money
Taxis make no money
Petrol stations make no money
Pubs make no money
They’re all relatively expensive to me and I don’t know who’s making money but with those prices, someone is and it’s not me
Could it happen here ? Dunno, we’ll have to ask the germans what they want us to do.
I hope they get deported to a far away penal colony .
Could it happen here , most definately, politicians here have little understanding of these matters , and its big business after all , they will always bend the knee to big business…
We have huge data centers here , Im surprised that it was Oz first , but then again, plain package tobacco cases were trialled in OZ before here , I suspect we have a similar legal system
Sean Sherlocks efforts a few years ago were just embarrassing
“Judges here simply don’t have the same leeway to make judgements of this kind, regardless of whether they’d like to or not”
High court judges seem to and they have granted injunctions on several occassions for ISPs to provide personal details of pirates despite data protection legislation.
Before EMI and Others (2010) which instituted a 3 strikes policy in which pirates can have their internet disconnected, there was a case where EMI (and others) had successfully sued to get the personal details from Eircom on customers who had engaged in piracy.
This is it: EMI and others vs Eircom (2005):
http://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IEHC/2005/H233.html
More recently than that (2014) Ryan Air sued to get the personal details based on an IP Address from an ISP to find out which of their pilots were rubbishing them on an online forum so they could sue for defamation. Will provide the link in a subsequent comment since the journal seems to have a phobia of two links appearing in the same comment.
2013 actually:
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/ryanair-sues-former-pilot-for-defamation-over-safety-remarks-1.1958133
Breaking rocks in the hot sun
So a company who made a film about breaking the law is upset at people breaking the law?????
Napster
Limewire
Piratebay
The $8,000,000 iPod…
“European privacy law is very different from Australian and American law.” EU law has not yet succumbed to Venture Capitalist Ass raping however it is but a few bribes away.
This comes as no surprise.. Australia leads the world in draconian legislation. It is a nanny state in which adults are smothered in regulation and thereby treated like children. Funnily enough I kinda agree with this ruling! If u watch something it’s only fair you give a few quid for its production
Even if we consider that downloading those movies was “wrong”, the ISP handing over their data is much worse and a breach of trust. Hope those people used purevpn, otherwise they are doomed.
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