Appeal Of Important iiNet vs. AFACT Case Begins

from the rehearing-the-same-thing dept

As you may recall, a bunch of movie studios sued popular ISP iiNet for failing to somehow wave a magic wand and stop file sharing. Thankfully, the Australian court quickly realized this was ridiculous and issued a thorough and convincing ruling that it made no sense to consider iiNet liable for copyright infringement done by its users. The judge pointed out that there’s no evidence that iiNet “approved infringement.” The judge also made it clear why it’s nonsensical to think that ISPs should serve as copyright cops, since a determination on whether or not something is infringing takes place in a court, not by random ISP employees.

Not surprisingly, the movie studios and AFACT (the “anti-piracy” organization representing them) appealed the ruling, claiming that somehow the lack of stopping copyright infringement was effectively “authorizing” copyright infringement. That seems like a huge stretch, but the appeal has begun and AFACT is now trying to make the case that not blocking users or kicking them off is the equivalent of authorization. Hopefully the appeals court recognizes the wisdom of the lower court ruling.

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Companies: afact, iinet

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Comments on “Appeal Of Important iiNet vs. AFACT Case Begins”

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14 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

I don’t agree is that important, is just one more day in the playground.

ASSFACT is not thinking about the future, when people start using the internet for other things that will have a real impact and change how we interact with the world again.

If I was iiNet I would make a video of children having a monthly talk with their doctor in a rural area and showing why it is to aggressive to disconnect people from the internet, besides of course the obvious that no layman can know what is against the law or not and punishing third parties for acts of others is just plain ridiculous if their are not really promoting breaking the law.

Would ASSFACT disconnect children from healthcare?

Jahm says:

AFACT - their memebers rip off their artists and post bogus surveys.

Thieves? It’s the members of AFACT that are cooking the books, and ripping off their own artists…..

The fact that they are trying to fence everyone into their their greedy and “corporate moron” distribution methods, kind of shows them up for the thieving lying hypocrites they really are.

http://torrentfreak.com/tech-news-sites-tout-misleading-bittorrent-piracy-study-100724/ [torrentfreak.com]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml [techdirt.com]

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-disney-20100708,0,4051564.story [latimes.com]

Fugetaboutit says:

Texting While Driving

In the same way, I plan on demanding to know if the next person who rear ends my vehicle was texting at the precise moment of the collision. Then I plan to sue the crap out of their insurance company (if they have an insurance company) because it should be the responsibility of the insurance companies to make sure they demand that the people they insure DO NOT TEXT WHILE DRIVING. If the laws aren’t going to be written forbidding the insane unsafe practice of this horrible technology while operating a motor vehicle on public highways, then I will sue the lawmakers as well for gross negligence.

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