Külföldi torrent oldalak Dallas Buyers Club Piracy Case: Isps Want $108,000 Before They Hand Over Alleged...

Dallas Buyers Club piracy case: ISPs want $108,000 before they hand over alleged pirates' identities

The owners of the Hollywood film Dallas Buyers Club are being asked in a landmark piracy case to pay $108,000 in security before several Australian ISPs divulge the identities of customers alleged to have illicitly shared the film online in order for them to be pursued for breach of copyright.

Richard Lancaster, SC, lawyer for the ISPs involved – iiNet, Dodo, Internode, Amnet Broadband, Adam Internet and Wideband Networks – told the Federal Court on Thursday that matching the 4700 IP addresses of alleged pirates provided by Dallas Buyers Club's piracy hunting firm Maverick Eye with its customers' accounts was not an easy task.

It would require "manual intervention" to interrogate its systems in a way that produced useful information, he said.

"These systems are not built to answer preliminary discovery requests or orders."

But Ian Pike, SC, representing Dallas Buyers Club LLC, said the $108,000 figure was excessive. In other jurisdictions where Dallas Buyers Club LLC successfully sought such information it had cost substantially less than $108,000, Mr Pike said.

In an earlier hearing the ISPs initially pushed for $275,000 in security, but Justice Nye Perram pushed back on this, requesting evidence from iiNet and the other ISPs about exactly how much it would cost to retrieve the alleged pirates' identities.

Justice Perram is likely to decide on the amount of security the ISPs should be given by June 18, when he will next hear the matter.

But he said on Thursday that the $108,000 amount seemed excessive.

"... it does look pretty extravagant to what the uninformed mind such as mine would have thought was a fairly automated task," Justice Perram said.

The reason iiNet and the other ISPs want security before they hand over identities is because Dallas Buyers Club LLC is a US-based company outside of Australia's jurisdiction, meaning if the ISPs handed over the details now they might not ever be compensated for retrieving data from their systems in order to help Dallas Buyers Club police its own copyright.

Details of proposed letters to be sent to alleged pirates was also discussed in Thursday's hearing, although the contents still remain a mystery. What's clear, however, is that iiNet, which was provided with the letters on May 13, has taken issue with their contents.

Mr Pike said there would be two types of letters – one sent to what he called "direct infringers", the other for cafes and other places that have public Wi-Fi, to serve as educative notices about the fact their connection had been used for illicit purposes.

The latest instalment of the case comes as a lawyer representing Dallas Buyers Club LLC in Australia told social news website Mashable that the owners of Dallas Buyers Club would soon go after more than just the 4700 customers of ISPs involved in the current court case.

"DBC will be writing to the other ISPs in the next week seeking consent to similar court orders as those obtained against iiNet," Marque Lawyers partner Nathan Mattock told Mashable on Thursday.

It also follows iiNet and the other ISPs being ordered to pay 75 per cent of Dallas Buyers Club LLC's legal costs in the case after the ISPs lost the argument that they shouldn't have to hand over customers' identities (Justice Perram ordered that they would have to hand over the details).

The ISPs did, however, secure Justice Perram's oversight of the letters to be sent to alleged pirates in order to avoid what's called "speculative invoicing", whereby rights holders threaten legal action unless thousands of dollars are paid to settle.

In an ironic twist, it was recently revealed the owners of the Dallas Buyers Club film were being sued for copyright infringement themselves.

In a complaint filed in California's federal court, the rights holders of the Godzilla franchise, Toho, have claimed the filmmakers of Colossal , owned by Dallas Buyers Club's parent company Voltage Pictures, "are brazenly producing, advertising, and selling an unauthorised Godzilla film of their own", The Hollywood Reporter reported earlier this week.