Külföldi torrent oldalak Village Roadshow Is Preparing To Sue Australian Pirates

Graham Burke, the co-chief of movie company Village Roadshow, is not going to go easy on pirates.

In an interview on SBS's The Feed Tuesday, Burke said the company was preparing to sue people caught illegally downloading its film and television content.

When Australia's new copyright infringement code comes into effect, those identified as pirating could find their details being handed over to content owners like Village Roadshow.

Released in February, the new code is an industry-led "three strikes" regime, also known as the Copyright Notice Scheme, which was created at the request of the Australian government.

Under the code, an Australian who receives three infringement notices within a 12-month period could be subject to "an expedited preliminary discovery process," which means Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Telstra and iiNet may be forced to hand over a pirate's personal details, if a rights holder is granted permission by the Federal Court.

The code was scheduled to begin on Sept. 1, but its start date remains uncertain after ISPs and rights holders failed to agree on how the cost to implement and enforce the code would be shared.

Burke told the SBS he wasn't particularly worried about public blowback when the lawsuits start rolling.

"Not if it's seen in the context that it is theft, and they have been doing the wrong thing, and they’ve been sent appropriate notices, and they’ve been dealt with accordingly," he said. "We’re certainly not going to be seeking out single pregnant mothers."

The three strikes regime has been criticised for not addressing the heart of the piracy problem: the high cost and lack of accessibility of entertainment content in Australia.

"Evidence from overseas strongly indicates that markets that have access to affordable, legitimate content do not have the same problem with online copyright infringement," advocacy group Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) said in a statement in February. "For example in the U.S. the relative volume of torrenting reduced five-fold after Netflix and others gained a foothold."

Burke has also confirmed the company would use Australia's new site blocking law, which passed in June, to go after websites it considers to be facilitating piracy. The bill allows content owners to go to the Federal Court for an injunction that would require ISPs to block foreign sites identified as hosting pirated content.

Burke told The Australian the company would be ready to go to court in October. He also said they had their eye on a couple of well-known piracy sites to go after initially, but declined to name them.

Foxtel has also said it's preparing lawsuits to take advantage of the site blocking law.

Critics have suggested the site blocking bill won't be effective in combating piracy, as new sites will open as others are blocked, and Australians will simply use virtual private network services (VPNs) to get around any restrictions.