| Title | Film Producers Abandon "Speculative Invoicing" Attempt In Australia | |
| Date | Friday February 12 2016, @09:26PM | |
| Author | cmn32480 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the omg-reasonableness-in-copyright dept. | ||
Simon Sharwood over at The Register (El Reg) is reporting on a just resolved court case involving the copyright holders (Voltage Pictures) and torrenters of the film Dallas Buyers Club.
According to El Reg:
Copyright-holders of the film Dallas Buyers Club have given up their pursuit of Australian pirates after a local Judge blocked their efforts at speculative invoicing.
The owners of the film have pursued Australian internet service provider iiNet for years, winning the right to access the details of subscribers it identified as having acquired copies of the film without paying. The film's owners wanted the personal details so it could write to the subscribers and ask them to cough up.
Federal Court Justice Nye Perram had no problem with pirates being asked to pay for the film, but thought it right that proven pirates pay not much more than they would do to rent the movie. He reached that decision after rejecting arguments that torrenting a film is tantamount to distribution and that individual pirates should therefore pay the higher licence fee asked of distributors. Punitive damages were also not something he sanctioned.
The Judge therefore set stern conditions about what the owners were allowed to say to alleged pirates in any communication. To encourage the film's owners to comply, he required that they lodge a bond of AU$600,000 with the court before sending any letters.
Perram also insisted that the court be able to see any letters before they were sent to alleged pirates, to ensure that the film's owners didn't demand sums he felt were improper. By setting the bond at $600,000, he figured he would wipe out any profit the film's owners might make by contacting pirates.
Last December the case returned to court and Perram gave the film's owners a deadline of today, February 11th 2016, to describe a licence fee and a form of words it would send pirates, or to appeal. If the owners didn't act before today, Perram proposed to wind up the case for good.
The film's owners haven't responded because they didn't see any way to get the outcome they wanted, presumably the right to charge a distribution licence. While the paperwork's not yet appeared, that decision will presumably bring the matter to an end.
[Continues...]
El Reg goes on to speculate on the pros and cons of this outcome:
This resolution to the case isn't necessarily a victory for torrenters. For starters, the case was never about whether copyright had been breached: that was taken as read. Secondly, there's now a precedent that ISPs can be forced to reveal the identities of suspected pirates under some circumstances. The court has also accepted evidence of pirates' identities gathered by a copyright-owner's hired piracy-spotters.
On the upside, Australians have a precedent for judicial intolerance of speculative invoicing.
Back on the downside, Hollywood's recovered from past rebuffs by lobbying for legislative remedies, such as the three strikes law agreed to by local ISPs after threats of harsher legislation.
Is it reasonable for copyright holders to seek compensatory damages (e.g. in line with the cost of renting/paid streaming/viewing in a theater) from individuals who torrent content for their own personal use?
Or should we just flip a gigantic bird at the content industries (video, music, books, etc.) and suggest that they perform as The Fonz suggested?
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printed from SoylentNews, Film Producers Abandon "Speculative Invoicing" Attempt In Australia on 2024-04-20 16:12:48