Court orders document handover in piracy case
Federal Court yesterday instructs studios to provide documents to ISP iiNET.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under News
In the case between movie and television studios and ISP iiNet, the Federal Court yesterday required the film and television organisations to take a more reasonable approach to discovery in the case.
Last week iiNet asked the media bodies to hand over a wide range of documents including those revealing any action they have taken against other internet providers to combat online piracy.
Originally, the organisations refused to give any discovery to iiNet but have now been ordered to co-operate in relation to 21 categories of discovery. The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) must also produce documents in relation to 19 categories of discovery.
The setback for the film and television organisations, which includes the Seven Network, comes just one month after they were forced to withdraw a key element of their copyright claim against iiNet and pay iiNet’s legal costs relating to that withdrawal.
iiNet’s Managing Director, Michael Malone also questioned why the film and TV industry is reluctant to provide information about how the industry was monitoring or policing allegations of copyright breaches overseas.
“Here we have more than 20 of the world’s largest film and television organisations saying copyright breaches are an international problem and that we, as a small Perth-based ISP, should do something about, it but they won’t provide information on what they are doing elsewhere in the world to tackle the issue.”
Last week AFACT barrister Tony Bannon SC told the court: “There may be some political material they want to get out of it… but it doesn’t have any relevance.”
The case continues.
4 Responses
Phoof, it took a while to find this one…..
It was revealed officially in the Queensland Sunday Mail’s telly book today (with a huge splash on the front cover [she’s a real cutey is Dichen Lachlan] ) that Joss’s Dollhouse is going to Fox8, I am a huge fan of that series.
It has to be asked what are viewers supposed to do when the local free tv channels won’t air a series like that and people who love it can’t afford pay tv.
Waiting for DVD release is not an option. It’s the free tv who should be in the courts.
The only option apart from D/L is getting friends to send VCR tapes
It seems to me it’s not the ISP’s that are to blame for illegal downloads, it’s the local FT TV folks.
Good luck iiNet
the studios would want to control the internet like china…and we know how little piracy goes on there.
LOL at MM playing iinet down as a “small Perth-based ISP”. But good luck to them.
See the studios have to prove that the ISP knowingly let people DL copyrighted material, can any ISP say no one is doing it through their service? And more so if there is a technically or legal way to stop it happening?