What new piracy laws mean for you

What new piracy laws mean for you

THE likelihood of getting busted for illegally downloading the latest film release just increased, with individual pirates coming in the firing line of a major Aussie film distributor.

During its half-yearly financial results presentation to investors, Village Roadshow announced an aggressive five-point program for combating piracy.

As part of the push, the film studio will be “suing infringers” caught downloading illegal content.

The program will also involve the continued blocking of infringing websites, working with Google to block or demote the page ranking for piracy sites, ensuring the availability of legal products and a “major PR campaign” to educate consumers.

Village Roadshow made mention of the success it had in getting the Australian Federal Court to rule that internet service providers must “take reasonable steps to disable access” of torrent sites.

Along with Foxtel, the major Australian film distributor had 61 domain names — including the popular Torrentz, IsoHunt, TorrentHound and the Pirate Bay — blocked by ISPs.

As the judge also supported the application of rolling injunctions to make it easier to chase offending sites, Village Roadshow will be lodging another list of sites it would like blocked.

“Using bipartisan legislation, access to The Pirate Bay website has been blocked, resulting in a dramatic reduction in downloads from that site,” the company said, reports ZDNet.

“In February, will initiate the blocking of a further 40 pirate sites, constituting approximately 90 per cent of the flow.”

The company said it is hoping to see a similar drop in piracy as in Korea, which had a 90 per cent decrease in illegal downloads as a direct result of site blocking.

While the threat of going after individual Australians who download movies or TV shows without paying might sound troubling, the effectiveness is questionable.

In December 2015, the makers of Oscar-winning movie Dallas Buyers Club unsuccessfully attempted to secure the details of almost 5000 Aussies it believed illegally shared copies of the film online.

The film makers wanted to not only fine each infringer, but to also charge them for the cost of legally buying the film, a one-off rental fee, a licence fee for uploading activity and the costs of obtaining the downloader’s details from the ISPs.

The Federal Court threw out the case, with the Justice Nye Perram calling its contentions “wholly unrealistic”.

Award winning intellectual property lawyer Cathryn Warburton said the problem with the Dallas Buyers Club case was the copyright owner wanted to send “speculative invoices” to individual infringers.

“These invoices were considered by the court to be excessive and contained amounts meant to punish the infringers, rather than recoup the amount lost by the individual illegal download,” she told news.com.au.

“The copyright owners did not lose that case, but rather did a cost-benefit analysis and decided it was not worth going after infringers for a lesser amount.”

Ms Warburton said Village Roadshow could succeed where Dallas Buyers Club failed if it does not “overreach” and try and claim too much from each individual infringer.

“The new Village Road Show case may simply be a scare tactic, and we may see a process similar to that in the Dallas Buyers Club case where Village Road Show uses the publicity of the litigation to scare off potential infringers with no intent to take it to its final conclusion,” she said.

“The small payment it might receive from each illegal downloader is unlikely to be its aim. The aim is likely to be to warn off illegal downloaders that it can (and will) take action. A certain percentage of would-be illegal downloaders will be scared off by such a case, and perhaps that is all that Village Road Show is hoping for.

“If the case does proceed, Village Road Show will likely win against infringers, but the dollar figure per infringement is likely to be fairly low. Of course, they will claim legal costs, but a mass-suit is likely to see legal costs split among all infringers, lowering the cost to each infringer.”

Are you concerned by the latest warning from Village Roadshow? Continue the conversation in the comments below or with Matthew Dunn on Facebook and Twitter.