blog Remember how a coalition of most of Australia’s major ISPs proposed a scheme about a year ago which would see Australians issued with warning and educational notices if they were caught pirating content online? The one which could have seen users’ details handed over to the copyright lobby with a subpoena? Well, it’s looking increasingly like the scheme is dead in the water. The Australian reports today (we recommend you click here for the full article):

“A scheme to help Hollywood movie studios catch online copyright infringers is on the verge of collapse after iiNet, the nation’s third-largest telco, abandoned plans to trial the new system.”

In our view, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the scheme collapsed with the withdrawal of iiNet. As your writer wrote when the scheme was first announced, it would have opened the door for content owners to start taking hundreds of thousands of Australians to court for minor offences such as downloading a few TV episodes — you know, the kind of mass BitTorrent lawsuits which we’ve seen in the US. Yuck.

Image credit: mtellin, Creative Commons