Külföldi torrent oldalak Australian Court Determines Level Of Fines In Piracy Case

A local court is going to assess how the copyright owners deal with people pirating Dallas Buyers Club due to fears that they were trolling alleged pirates to extort settlements.

In the case launched by Voltage Pictures, the court delivered a landmark ruling a few days ago, according to which a number of Australia’s largest ISPs were forced to reveal personal details of over 4,700 users suspected of sharing the Oscar-winning movie online via BitTorrent and other services.

But this is not an unconditional victory: an Australian justice will decide how much money the movie studio can demand from the suspects. The court required the plaintiffs to submit a draft of a letter they are going to send to identified file-sharers. Another stipulation of the court decision was that the identities of the Internet subscriber remain confidential.

A few months ago, the largest broadband providers in the country refused to hand over personal details, calling previous requests of Voltage Pictures “speculative invoicing” ahead of the lawsuit. The ISPs claimed that the copyright owners were using discovery letters to threaten Internet users into making settlements.

In the meantime, Voltage Pictures is known as a smaller, independent movie company, with its recent releases including Don Jon, Killer Joe and Thanks for Sharing. The company has also aggressively pursued copyright infringement cases in the United States and Denmark.

In the United States, with the help of the US Internet service providers, the company obtained names and IP addresses of people who had illegally downloaded the movie and filed suit against them threatening with a fine of up to $150,000. Suspected pirates have usually settled out of court for around $5,000.

Entertainment industry has responded forcefully to the increase in digital piracy, but many copyright owners simply ask the broadband providers to forward their users a written warning. However, some adult content distributors including the Io Group have aggressively pursued the lawsuit strategy with great success – they even provided convenient PayPal and credit card options in those threatening “notification” letters.

In other countries – for example, Canada, – ISPs have chosen to throttle P2P traffic – in other words, they slowed down the Internet connections of people using the Internet to access potentially illegal files via P2P services.