Piracy drops despite no website blocks, ‘3-strikes’ scheme
Online copyright infringement has declined in Australia according to a new government-backed study.
Online copyright infringement has declined in Australia according to a new government-backed study.
Lawyers representing a group music labels and telcos Optus, Telstra and TPG and their subsidiaries, as well Foxtel in its capacity as an ISP, returned to the Federal Court today for a hearing on the third application for website blocking based on changes made last year to the Copyright Act.
An application for a Federal Court injunction that will compel Telstra, Optus, TPG and Foxtel’s broadband arm to block customer access to Kickass Torrents will proceed for now despite the file-sharing site’s domains being seized and its alleged operator arrested.
The US has seized the domain names of file-sharing website Kickass Torrents and sought the extradition of the site’s alleged operator, Artem Vaulin, to face criminal charges.
The degree of ongoing court oversight involved in the blocking of pirate websites was a central disagreement as Village Roadshow, Foxtel and a group of ISPs returned to Federal Court in Sydney on Friday.
The cost of complying with an injunction compelling ISPs to block access to a number of pirate websites, the costs of legal proceedings, and how to deal with mirror and proxy sites are the key areas of difference between Foxtel and Village Roadshow on one side and a group of ISPs on the other, according to Richard Lancaster SC.
A group of music labels and licensing organisation APRA AMCOS are seeking a more limited form of website blocking than Foxtel and Village Roadshow in their efforts to curb piracy.
TPG (including subsidiaries such as iiNet), Telstra, Optus and M2 have confirmed they don’t intend to oppose Federal Court applications by Foxtel and Village Roadshow that seek to have the ISPs block their customers access a collection of piracy-linked websites.
The award-winning Australian author Jackie French is wrong. In her open letter, she blasts the Productivity Commission’s report on intellectual property, released last month.
The Productivity Commission’s draft report into Australia’s intellectual property regime has called for a shakeup of the country’s IP laws.
Four music labels have joined forces and launched legal action aimed at forcing Australia’s largest Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to a major piracy-linked BitTorrent site.
Internet service providers are not expected to put up a fight against prospective court orders that will compel them to block access to a number of piracy-linked websites, but the finer details of how such a block will be implemented and maintained is yet to be determined.
Court filings from the first two attempts to use a controversial anti-piracy law offer details of what websites rights holders want blocked and how they expect Internet service providers to block their customers from accessing them.
Internet service providers that will be affected by prospective Federal Court injunctions ordering them to block subscriber access to specified piracy-linked websites are moving to ensure the process is as streamlined as possible.
Representatives of the telecommunications and Australian content industries have yet to finalise key details of a scheme that will see alleged pirates sent a series notices warning them to cease illicit downloads.