Stuart Corner
Thursday, 04 February 2010 10:32
IT Policy -
Government Tech Policy
Page 1 of 4
iiNet has scored a comprehensive victory in the copyright case brought against it by 34 movie industry players, with the judge finding that iiNet as an ISP did not authorise copyright infringement and was not required to act against those of its users who downloaded copyright movies.
Justice Cowdroy, in his
findings handed down this morning in the Federal Court in Sydney found that iiNet was aware of copyright infringements by its users and had not acted to stop them but nevertheless had not authorised copyright infringement because:
"The mere provision of access to the Internet is not a 'means' of infringement...a scheme of notification, suspension and termination of customer accounts is not a relevant power to prevent copyright infringement [under the Copyright Act]...[and] the requisite element of [iiNet] favouring infringement, on the evidence simply does not exist."
Justice Cowdroy awarded costs to iiNet. CEO Michael Malone estimated the case had cost it $4m in addition to an unspecified portion of the total cost provided through insurance.
AFACT, representing the 34 movie companies, had employed a company known as DtecNet to investigate copyright infringement by iiNet customers using BitTorrent. The information generated from these investigations was then sent to iiNet. AFACT wanted iiNet to send a warning to the infringing customers and if they failed to respond to suspend or, ultimately, terminate their service.
