The case where Hollywood is suing an Internet Service Provider for not deterring piracy is starting up tomorrow in court.
We have been following the story where Hollywood is suing an ISP for allowing piracy to occur on their networks and today marks the final day before the battle in court.
It’s already well known that detection and filtering of file-sharing traffic is impractical and impossible by any reasonable measure thanks to an in depth analysis from two seperate studies in different countries, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping the major movie studios from basically demanding the impossible. The ISP in question already offered to enrol in the program to prove how flawed it is. It’s a case that seems to be echoing lobbying papers made by the MPAA in the United States.
While tomorrow is a key day in a land-mark case for Australians, the case was made more interesting through revelations posted in the Business Spectator today. The article explains that Hollywood hired an investigator, Aaron Herps, to sign up onto iiNet to essentially break international copyright law for a period of four months through BitTorrent. After recording the IP addresses of thousands of Australians, the evidence was burned onto CDs and DVDs (why the evidence required more than 4GB of storage seems rather strange when it’s essentially a short sequence of numbers broken apart by dots unless the investigator was distributing pirated movies on the DVDs to a third party) and handed the evidence to police.
One of the strangest parts of Hollywoods arguements is that because the investigator was not disconnected for copyright infringement, iiNet can therefore be accused of encouraging piracy by not disconnecting people like Herps. This would be quite a departure from what went down during the MGM vs. Grokster case in the United States where the companies in question actually advertised that one could download the latest copyrighted works (and why the copyright industry won) The difference between the MGM case and this case (outside of judicial difference) is the fact that the copyright industry this time is saying encouragement is through not doing anything at all. Believe it or not, this is reportedly the critical argument the major US studios is using against the Australian ISP.
One might point out that it’s an international norm thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that an ISP is not liable for copyright infringement because they are merely a conduit for communication and cannot control specifically what flows through their networks – a fact backed up by the two ISP-level filtering studies in the first place.
Lastly, the article notes that the copyright industry can still choose to legally pursue the alleged file-sharers, but clearly, the target is the ISPs and not necessarily the users for now.
The case will more than likely be an interesting case indeed.
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Next we’ll be able to sue the Govt for building the highways that criminals use for their unlawful activities.