It is not clear who won in the Dallas Buyers Club LLC court case and was it moot?
Yesterday saw the Dallas Buyers Club succeed in its bid to force internet service providers to reveal the identity of customers who illegally download content. In this cross post from The Conversation, David Glance argues the verdict may not be all that clear-cut.
There will be thousands of Australians who are now concerned about the prospect of receiving lawyers letters accusing them of downloading the movie the Dallas Buyers Club in April or May of 2014.
The Australian Federal Court has ruled that a group of Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will have to hand over the identities of some 4,726 of their customers. The ISPs involved were Dodo, Internode, Amnet Broadband, Adam Internet and Wideband Networks. Strangely, customers of the major ISPs Telstra, Optus and TPG were unaffected by this ruling and it is not clear why these particular companies have been spared (so far).
The Dallas Buyers Club LLC who have brought the action to the courts, used technology from German company Maverickeye to detect people who had participated in sharing the film between April 2 to May 27, 2014.
The technology to detect the downloaders worked by participating in the process of torrenting a particular movie file. Torrenting works by every computer being able to share bits of a file between them. As soon as a computer has downloaded a bit of a file, it then (usually) makes it available for other computers to upload. The software from Maverickeye simply took part in this process and recorded the IP address of every computer that was willing to share, or upload, parts of the movie.
Technically, those downloaders who had switched off the upload feature of their BitTorrent software would not have been of interest to the Dallas Buyers Club LLC. They were apparently only interested in those customers how had “made the film available online to other persons; electronically transmitted the film to other persons; and made copies of the whole or a substantial part of the film”
The tactics of the Dallas Buyers Club LLC have been strange to say the least. For a start, the number of infringers that they are pursuing is relatively small. They avoided customers of the major ISPs like Telstra, Optus and TPG. There has been a long held belief that if you want to avoid infringement notices from downloading, it was best to be with one of these ISPs rather than the smaller ones that could be pushed around. The Federal Court judge Justice Pereman ruled that Dallas Buyers Club LLC will have to pay the ISPs legal costs and also the costs of providing the customer information.
But most importantly, any letter that the Dallas Buyers Club LLC wants to send to customers will need to be reviewed by the court. This is very significant because the judge is seeking to avoid what is called “speculative invoicing”. This is where a company sends a threatening letter which asks the customer for a large amount of money instead of taking the matter to court. iiNet has argued that the cost of the download to the film owners is of the order of $10 but as in other cases, the Dallas Buyers Club LLC are likely to want to go for fines in the hundreds of dollars. The exact price will be set by the judge and of course this is likely to dampen the overall amount of money it gets from the exercise.
Taking these points into consideration, it is hard to see what Voltage Pictures, the owners of the film, will have gained by this entire process. If the fines are insubstantial, they will not serve as any form of deterrent for future torrents and in any event, Voltage Pictures does not have any particular interest in the more general issue of people torrenting content.
In any event, with the introduction of streaming services like Netflix in Australia, it is likely that torrenting is going to become less of an issue which is what downloaders have been arguing all along. Once the movie industry actually provides a country with a reasonably priced and easily accessed service, the need to obtain content without paying goes away. In the meantime however, they seem intent on creating their own live theatre through the Australian courts.
David Glance is director of UWA Centre for Software Practice at University of Western Australia.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
I heard the fine was going to be $9,000? Is there any merit in this?
I’m kind of freaking out a little….
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It would have been nice if you had attributed the graphic you used to its creator – Allie Brosh http://hyperboleandahalf.blogs.....ntact.html
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Thanks Tamara,
Credits have now been made.
Cheers
Nic – Mumbrella
@goodone.
I think the $9,000 was the “speculative” amounts they chased in the USA.. and thats why the Judge ruled the letters must go through the courts to avoid a bullshit amount.
Dont panic, they are a lonng way from your letterbox yet.
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We looked at the German infringment chasers market for a Village Roadshow research report we did. One has to understand that the incentive for lawyers is not the fine but the billable hours . There are two beneficiaries in the process, the content rights holder ,and the costs (lawyers income) . The former could get as low as only $5.99 (the legitimate first release movie download window cost) , the later income from the costs judgement.
It will be a lucrative industry because once you have the downloader details, its a form demand.
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The lesson here is make sure you have a ISP too big to sue…
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This rather small legal action will just encourage people to hide behind proxies and indeed, it encourages proxy suppliers to create even more secure services.
Far better that Hollywood, which makes immense profits from films despite it’s whinging work on methods to provide content as cheaply as it can.
They are never going to win the PR war while name actors are demanding $20M to appear in a film.
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“Once the movie industry actually provides a country with a reasonably priced and easily accessed service, the need to obtain content without paying goes away. In the meantime however, they seem intent on creating their own live theatre through the Australian courts.”
Totally agree. I got Netflix the day it launched and couldn’t have been happier to give them my credit card. Haven’t even thought about torrenting a TV show or movie since….
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@Sam
You have hit the nail on the head there. Like Gervais referenced in one of his Golden Globes addresses: “Actors?”
Actors are overpaid as are musicians. They have been living off royalties for far too long and the middle men who have also been earning lazy money are realising that these rivers of gold are moving away.
Actors???
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we pay for data as part of our Internet contracts with ISPs
who is to say what that data is made up of ?
surely the $100 plus per month I pay to my ISP covers the access cost to retrieve data through downloads ?? or am I expected to pay just to look but not touch…
and it seems the industry is it’s own worst enemy, hence Game of Thrones S5 leak was by previews that had been sent to the press for review purposes ???
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The judge has in fact allowed this organisation to extort money from people. The fact that he has asked to review the letter is irrelevant, as is the costs of the action – this can all be recovered from the people they sue under a tort.
This will allow content buyers to extort anyone who “downloads” copyright material (viewing material is downloading). If for instance a Bahamas registered company owned the material created by Allie Brosh, they could demand $50 000 in cash from Mumbrella – a “fair” amount given the value and costs of any action.
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