0/5

Studios ask Federal Court to block piracy website

New laws introduced last year to block piracy websites will be tested for the first time.

2016-02-18_1545

New laws introduced last year to block piracy websites will be tested for the first time with Village Roadshow seeking to block SolarMovie.ph which facilitates the free streaming of movies and TV including Star Wars and The Walking Dead.

It has filed a case in the Federal Court under the Copyright Amendment (online infringement) Act, which if successful will require Australian ISPs to block the site from general access. The laws were introduced in Parliament last June.

Village Roadshow will be backed by Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal, Sony, Disney and 21st Century Fox, who signed off on the action overnight.

Foxtel is also expected to file a case against notorious bit torrent site, The Pirate Bay.

However the sites would still be accessible via Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Meanwhile Village Roadshow Co-CEO Graham Burke today revealed the “three strikes” warning system has been officially shelved.

“We reached the conclusion after having an independent audit firm evaluate the cost of sending out the notices, and we concluded that it was too much of an imposition to ask the ISPs, and also from our own point of view, the amount it would cost,” he said.

“We concluded that it was too much of an imposition to ask the ISPs, and also from our own point of view, the amount it would cost.

“So we decided not to push it forward.”

But he indicated instead of manual notices an automated system was coming.

“When automation occurs, instead of costing AU$16 or AU$20 a notice, which is just prohibitive, it will cost cents per notice,” he said. “In other words, the ISPs will have an automated system that can be done simply, as opposed to at the moment it’s manual.”

Laurie Patton CEO o fnon-profit group Internet Australia said recently, “There is ample research evidence that people are willing to pay if they can get the content they’re after. In fact, surveys show that the people who ‘pirate’ are also among the most active legal downloaders.”

Source: ABC, CNET, Fairfax

8 Responses

  1. Good luck to them. If Itunes made the show more affordable I will happily buy the shows from them. I don’t see the point of trying to close them down, more will just pop up in their place.

  2. “We concluded that it was too much of an imposition to ask the ISPs, and also from our own point of view, the amount it would cost.”

    Actually, they tried, thru the court, to force the ISPs to bear the cost of the notice scheme but the ISPs said “uh-uh” and the court agreed. Strangley, Village Roadshow and their ilk didn’t want to pay for it either.

    I see that Burke is still prone to hyperbole – “…they’re a particularly vicious bunch of thieves”; and wild exaggeration – “They’re making illicit millions with their disgusting advertising.”

        1. Well, they could just as easily block lookups to Google DNS or any other DNS server (several, mostly smaller, ISPs already block requests from customers to external DNS servers by address, port, or packet contents). But there’s ways and means…

Leave a Reply