A Sydney CBD Internet cafe has been shut down after an AFP raid found hundreds of thousands of illegally downloaded movies and television shows on the cafe's servers.
On 25 November Magistrate McIntosh fined Interville Technology Pty Ltd $82,000 plus court costs for 40 charges of copyright infringement. In addition, the computer terminals and servers that the cafe had been using were seized.
The cafe was using 60 computer workstations and three servers to store a total of eight terabytes of data — mostly illegally obtained movie, television and music content. As well as charging customers hourly rates for viewing this content, the cafe was selling storage devices with capacities of up to 60GB (enough to store more than 40 downloaded movies at a time).
Neil Gane, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft's director of operations, said: "It is satisfying to see sentences handed down which properly reflect the damage operations like this do to rights owners and the 50,000 Australians working in the film and TV industries."