Külföldi torrent oldalak Dallas Buyers Club: Iinet Case Thrown Out In Landmark Ruling On Piracy In Australia

AUSTRALIANS who download movies or TV shows without paying have had a major win.

The Federal Court today threw out an attempt by the makers of Oscar-winning movie Dallas Buyers Club to not only seek the private details of almost 5000 Aussies it believes illegally shared copies of the film online, but to slap them with extra fines.

It appears that Dallas Buyers Club had overreached with their claims in court, with the Justice Nye Perram calling its contentions “wholly unrealistic”.Last week, the company applied to the Federal Court to lift a stay on an order made in April.

It also applied to seek significant extra damages from the 4726 iiNet customers it accused of pirating the movie.

It wanted to not only fine each infringer but to also charge them for the cost of legally buying the film, a one-off rental fee, a licence fee for uploading activity, and the costs of obtaining the downloader’s details from the internet service providers.

The company also argued that each person who uploaded the movie to a torrenting website, such as The Pirate Bay, would need to pay for a “worldwide non-exclusive distribution agreement”.

“On this factual question, I concluded that DBC’s contention was wholly unrealistic; indeed, I went so far as to describe it as surreal,” Justice Perram wrote in his judgment.

Justice Nye Perram originally granted the company access to the private details of the 4726 iiNet account holders in April.
He ruled the film studio pay ISPs court costs and provide draft copies of letters it intended to hand out to the alleged copyright infringers before their details would be released.

He also required Dallas Buyers Club LLC pay a $600,000 bond to the court to prevent the company from issuing “speculative invoices”, where a company demands the downloader pay a fee that has no bearing on the actual price of buying a copy of the movie. If they did issue such an invoice it would lose the entire bond.

Justice Perram had ruled the film studio would have to reimburse ISPs for the time and money it took to obtain the addresses of the alleged infringers.
Besides dismissing DBC’s application today, Justice Perram said the film studio’s entire case would be thrown out unless it submitted to the court’s orders.

“Some finality must now be brought to these proceedings,” he said. “What I will do is make a self-executing order which will terminate the proceedings on Thursday, 11 February 2016 at noon unless DBC takes some steps before then.”