What is ‘reasonable’? – iiNet asks Hollywood
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- If one of Hollywood’s copyright enforcement organisations decides an ISP hasn’t been properly looking after movie industry interests by taking reasonable steps to stop supposedly illegal downloads, what’s “reasonable”?
iiNet’s Steve Dalby (right) would like to know.
The Australian ISP says it supports 700,000 dial up, broadband and telephony services, and “proudly employs more than 1300 people in Perth, Sydney, Auckland and Cape Town”.
Now, in a landmark copyright case, it’s being sued by Hollywood and the Seven Network for allegedly failing to stop users from downloading movies illegally and has now been ordered by the Oz federal court to hand over a sample of 20 customer records to be used as evidence.
“While iiNet’s request for discovering the global copyright investigations of the film industry was struck down by the judge,” it was, “granted some relief in relation to a request to have documents around local investigations brought before the court,” says IT News, continuing:
AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) has been ordered to co-operate with iiNet in relation to 21 categories of discovery and produce documents in relation to 19 more, says the story.
Among them, “the court will allow iiNet to see any ‘form of demand’ AFACT has served on other Internet Service Providers in Australia,” it says, adding, “AFACT refused to divulge whether it has in fact sent any such form of demand on ISPs other than iiNet to date.”
“The reason we asked for these documents was that we were looking for what this organisation, this conglomerate of Hollywood giants, has been trying to do overseas, and why it has chosen one Australian ISP to take action against,” IT News quotes iiNet chief regulatory officer Steve Dalby (right) as saying.
“I thought that was a pretty reasonable request.
“AFACT hasn’t told us what it is we didn’t do; they have simply said we didn’t take reasonable steps to stop copyright infringement on our network. What we’re trying to understand is what arrangements are defined as reasonable.
“There are 400 ISPs operating in Australia. If we were expected to take specific actions that nobody else is required to undertake, we would argue that is quite unreasonable. So we are asking AFACT the question while under the confidentiality of the court – what agreements do you have with other ISPs?”
June, 2009
iiNet – Aussies love P2P file sharing, May 29, 2009
IT News – iiNet ordered to hand over customer records, June 15, 2009
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June 16th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Excellent! Shine the brightest sunlight on these slimeballs!
June 17th, 2009 at 5:25 am
GWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!
What to do? What is reasonable?
Look for license tags in metadata in connections? FAIL! (Impossible + unreliable)
Look for file names? FAIL! (Impossible + unreliable)
Try to decrypt SSL’ed connection in real time? FAIL! (EPIC fail!)
Lock down the internet and restrict access? FAIL! (have never worked to 100%)
Analyze connection patterns? FAIL! (have never worked to 100%)
Trying to download files from popular torrents within their network? FAIL! (then they’d infringe on copyright themselves)
Then what? Ignore it? Ban people when they find out they are infringing copyright? What level of evidence are needed for that?
June 17th, 2009 at 7:47 am
wasn’t there some ISP that refused to gather any information at all since they also requested to be paid for their effort ?