Australian Copyright Troll Rumored To Have Shut Down 67
An anonymous reader writes "Remember how a shadowy group arose a few months back with the promise of suing thousands of Australians for allegedly pirating movies? ... Well, it looks like the effort has bit the dust as quickly as it was kicked off, with the organization's vice president of sales and marketing leaving and its website shut down. Sounds like that bright future of mega-lawsuits for Internet piracy wasn't so bright after all."
Re: (Score:2)
remember...? (Score:4, Funny)
Nope...
Re: (Score:3)
"Remember how a shadowy group arose a few months back with the promise of suing thousands of Australians for allegedly pirating movies?
Nope...
It's the reverse of the Pacific Price Dilation Field, crap in Oz costs twice as much as in the States and takes six months longer to get here. News from Oz takes six months to reach the States.
/., you can expect the story to be broken here a month after that.
Also given this is
Re: (Score:2)
porn to copyright law (Score:1)
Re:porn to copyright law (Score:5, Funny)
What does porn have to do with it? Don't compare copyright trolls to porn. Sex is a honorable business. In fact, it's one of the most honest businesses humankind has ever had. It's one of the basic needs after food and shelter.
Re: (Score:1)
I have nothing against porn but i think it would be easier to get away with something as dubious as this if you came from a law background, or a major music company. Maybe if all the population had your attitude they would have a chance.
Probably didn't help... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that lots of other jurisdictions around the planet have handed copyright and patent trolls their posteriors when they couldn't show actual proof they owned what they were suing over. SCO with their issues with Novell took the last vestiges of both the memory of the original SCO and of Caldera and ground them into a bloody pulp, and Righthaven recently hasn't done so well either.
I've maintained for a long time that if businesses that supply ideas want to get paid for their ideas, they need to charge the correct amount for them. As much as I dislike the movie industry for their incessant push for longer and longer copyrights, they do make it inexpensive to have movies in the home. New DVDs for $5.00 and new Blu-Ray for $10 are a no-brainer. The music industry still hasn't got it though, charging a lot more for CDs well past their release dates than they're worth. In the case of movies, they're still somewhat difficult to pirate given the size of files and the lossy formats, but the recording industry should have learned that pirating music for a megabyte a minute is a no-brainer for a lot of people, even if the formats are slightly lossy. They're probably still better than recording FM radio at 22KHz broadcast quality...
Re:Probably didn't help... (Score:5, Interesting)
Where are the $5 new release DVDs? We are charged closer to $25 which is why Australians pirate so many movies and TV shows. The price will only come down if regions are abolished to introduce competition.
Re: (Score:3)
Yup, and a 3D Bluray (which you'd think would be on special to try and push the tech) costs around $60.
For Americans wondering about exchange rates, we have rough parity at the moment, though the AUD has been creeping a couple of cents over now and again.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I'm not buying them, which is rather the point, those are prices I saw at JB Hifi I believe, I think the last time I lookes was about six months ago now.
Did not know Amazon.co.uk would ship to Australia... I'll be using that in future then.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
No, whoosh yourself. He's talking about the US, where they do cost that much, in parts.
Re: (Score:2)
Bullshit. Maybe in Chinatown, but that's the only place where you're getting new releases for $5.
Re: (Score:2)
First, I didn't say "New Releases", I said "New DVDs".
Best Buy, Walmart, the local supermarket, Fry's Electronics, Costco, all have DVDs for $5, and there are Blu-ray for $10. We bought all three Star Wars prequels on Blu-Ray for something like $30 at Best Buy, bought all eleven seasons of MASH on DVD from Costco for $80, and all eight Harry Potter movies on Blu-Ray for $80.
Those are the prices I'm talking about. If the movie is brand new, of course it'll cost more. There's enough demand to justify the c
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry; someone else started talking about new releases, rather than new products. Looking over the bestbuy.com prices, it turns out that you can actually buy quite a few Blu Ray discs for $7 to $15. Unfortunately, there are still quite a few movies that are $20+, despite being several years (and, in some cases, several decades) old.
So, yes, you're right -- there are $10 Blu Ray movies at Best Buy, but $10 is not their standard price for a movie. What you bought was probably a loss leader. They're hoping
Re: (Score:2)
The price will only come down if regions are abolished to introduce competition.
They have been. Australian DVD players are sold region free. I buy DVDs from Amazon these days if I can't find them locally for a really marked down price.
Re: (Score:2)
the recording industry should have learned that pirating music for a megabyte a minute is a no-brainer for a lot of people, even if the formats are slightly lossy. They're probably still better than recording FM radio at 22KHz broadcast quality...
You really need pretty decent equipment to be able to hear the difference between MP3 and CD, and listen concentrated, without doing something else while the music is playing nor having any background noises. In the vast majority of situations it fails on the first account already, most consumer grade electronics is just not good enough to tell the difference. Then people are usually doing something else while listening to music, and background noises are also commonplace.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Because, as I said, for most people and with normal quality audio equipment there is no audible difference between mp3 and CD. So mp3 is good enough, CD doesn't sound better, just costs more and is less convenient in storage and so. So indeed those people taking mp3 over CD may consider it better: sounds the same; more convenience.
Good enough is good enough. Anything better is only costing more for no extra benefit, as it's good enough already.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I can't afford a Bang and Olufsen setup, can you?
Re: (Score:2)
There's a time for silence (Score:5, Interesting)
The industry is getting just about everything it wants from almost every government in the world where a meaningful percentage of the population has access to high-speed internet.
This isn't the time or place to make the sheeple nervous by having a front company for the entertainment industry grab the home and life savings of some sweet old granny because a grandchild "stole" a half hour cartoon show.
Re:There's a time for silence (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it weird that if you steal a DVD from a store (get a physical disk, packaging, high quality) you get something like a $100 fine; yet when you download a film even if it was on TV the night before it apparently cost the movie industry tens of thousands.
Re:There's a time for silence (Score:4, Informative)
Not really... in most cases, the industry groups are more concerned with uploaders, rather than downloaders. It just so happens that most file sharing is synchronous. If you leeched all those files from an ftp site, they probably wouldn't care all that much about you, unless you ran into a particularly vindictive group of lawyers. Instead, they'd go after the guy who uploaded the files.
When some dumb teenager pirates an MP3, he doesn't get charged with thousands of dollars in fines. It's only when they upload the file, allowing hundreds (or thousands) of other people to download it, that you see people getting those kinds of fines. It makes more sense when you realize that uploading is the big problem that they're trying to stamp out. Kids (and stupid people) don't understand how the technology works, and they don't realize that they're uploading the files at the same time that they're downloading. Some people have tried to argue this in court ("I didn't know the program was sharing the files!"), but it didn't work out too well for them. Ignorance and stupidity don't usually work too well as a defense, unfortunately.
It's entirely possible that the rights holders will go after you for downloading a pirated movie from Megaupload, but it's really not worth their time. They'd rather go after the person who uploaded it and sue him for millions of dollars. Even if they did sue you, like you said, the amount of money they could claim to have lost is miniscule, since you haven't shared the file with anyone else.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not quite following. The suers don't want to bother suing the dumb teenager who pirates an mp3 but all downloaders are uploaders due to the nature of file sharing, so all downloaders are fair game, and the i didn't know excuse doesn't work.
Re: (Score:2)
It's only when they upload the file, allowing hundreds (or thousands) of other people to download it, that you see people getting those kinds of fines.
They seem to want to put the burden on a single uploader. However, if they also sued another person who was also downloading the exact same files, would they do the same to them? That seems like double-dipping to me. Getting paid for the same thing (all of the copies uploaded) multiple times.
Unless those millions of dollars are just punitive damages. But in that case, I'd say a fine that big is absolutely ridiculous.
It was likely a negotiating tactic from the start (Score:1)
The ISP trade union was in discussion with AFACT and others for an agreement on how to process copyright complaints. This was after the most ruling in the court case for iiNet. This bold announcement was likely a negotiating tactic from the start.
They were one step below dodgy lawyers (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps the legal firm they were employing in Brisbane finally convinced them it would be difficult to have a shotgun approach to sending out writs without going to jail for demanding money with menaces and contempt of court. I'm not a lawyer either, but when I described what this idiot at the Gold Coast was trying to do he considered it to be insane.
Unsurprising (Score:5, Insightful)
As I understand it, this organisation's purported plan was to attempt to sue copyright infringers by the innovative idea of actually following due process as required by Australian law - getting a court order to force ISPs to hand over the details of infringing customers and then attempt to extract money.
This is basically the same spectacularly unsuccessful [blogspot.com] process that the RIAA has been following in the USA.
iiNet, a major ISP over here that has been in the news a lot in copyright battles after getting taken to court by the media industry for bullshit like aiding and abetting copyright infringement (and winning) stated they were completely happy for this group to exist if that was their process, I assume because they knew it would be too expensive to be productive if they weren't able to get ISPs to just hand over customer details.
The whole thing seemed to be a lot of noise about nothing to me. Things like SOPA are much, much scarier to me as an Australian because it sounds like that will short-circuit the entire legal process - and given that we seem to inherit a lot of American IP laws, there's a real chance we'll cop it here.
Re:Unsurprising (Score:5, Interesting)
The catch is, Australia is loser pays. Which means in this kind of extortions game, lose just one case and everyone else will use that exact same defence and you lose every case. Those losses of course means you pay for your lawyer, their lawyer and court costs ie judge et al. Then it is also possible to file counter suit for psychological harm brought about by that attack in the courts, so really really dangerous game bound to blow up in the faces of the criminals who attempt it.
Re: (Score:2)
Just shut up with your damn wooshes, you're just making yourself look like a moron.
Re:Unsurprising (Score:4, Interesting)
The catch is, Australia is loser pays. Which means in this kind of extortions game, lose just one case and everyone else will use that exact same defence and you lose every case. Those losses of course means you pay for your lawyer, their lawyer and court costs ie judge et al. Then it is also possible to file counter suit for psychological harm brought about by that attack in the courts, so really really dangerous game bound to blow up in the faces of the criminals who attempt it.
Exactly, due to Australia's libel laws, you're up for more then just the winners court costs. They can counter sue for making a false accusation. This kind of thing has turned many legal issues into Mexican stand-offs (Victorian stand-offs) that have lasted for years.
Whilst this system pretty flawed, it does keep the Shyster Lawyer population down by making frivolous law suits too risky for the average person, thus depleting their food supply.
Overpaid (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Companies dont charge what they need to to make a profit anymore
Anymore? Must be a looooong time ago that they did that, then.
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.current.com.au/2011/11/21/article/UPDATE-Canon-issues-fighting-words-to-JB-Hi-Fi-over-grey-imports/XQGPTTQVSI.html [current.com.au]
As for movies and series, wait out the US release dates and then milk the Australian market for top dvd $ months or years later.
So yes someone in the middle is
Re: (Score:2)
Someone will find a way to give them the smackdown.
In the EU it was a combination of trademark and safety standards, IIRC, that allowed Sony to give the smackdown to grey-market importers of PSPs before the official european release date, effectively ending commercialisation of grey markets there and then. I have no doubt that if JB Hifi keep it up, and especially if others follow their lead, they'll find themselves on the wrong end of some or other legal travesty.
Of course the only reason they're even tryi
Re:Overpaid (Score:5, Insightful)
Businesses are in it to make money, and they will do their best to make as much money as possible. So they will charge a price as high as possible. If you think that movie is too expensive, don't go watch it, and the movie maker doesn't get anything. If you think that concert ticket costs too much, don't go watch it, and the concert organiser doesn't get anything.
Well maybe someone else thinks it's worth it, and will pay for it. And the concert organiser and movie theatre will charge a price where there are enough someones other than you that think it's worth the price to fill up the seats.
That you think it's overpriced doesn't mean it is overpriced, nor that they should lower prices.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Gimme a break.. people like Beyonce, 50cent, Metallica etc can blat on all they like. As long as they are making hundreds of millions for having fun and being adored by millions, while we pay through the nose to listen or watch it, there will be piracy.
Most of the money for the artists comes from doing concerts, endorsements etc. RIAA keeps most of the record sales.
Give them time (Score:1)
Better hurry ... (Score:2)
Not suprised (Score:5, Insightful)
To keep the law is amazingly hard if people don't want to. It is rarely touched upon but the police heavily relies on the good will of the people its patrols else it will soon become clear how you can keep 99% down with far less then 1%. See Libya. Khadaffi and his sons looked more suprised then anything else at the end. WTF happened. And then he died at the hand of a pauper he didn't even know existed.
In Holland there was a recent story about the police not knowing what to do with the person who has been drink driving for 30 years. In Holland we have no 3 strike rule OR consecutive sentences. This means the entire punishment system is basically, don't do it again or we will have to ask you again.
This works... for those people that want to obey the laws (drink driving is dangerous for yourself and most people don't want to hurt other people) but not for those who don't. It doesn't really matter whether YOU consider a law just or unjust, if you don't feel like obeying it, you won't.
Try this, for the essential Godwin. Say you could travel back in time and kill Hitler. Would you? It is murder and you WILL die for it. Will you do it? Maybe you wouldn't but say your grandfather who did live through it, would he? Would he commit murder for say a pair of sneakers?
People have come to accept downloading content without paying for it as acceptable. Just as people wanting to travel back in time to kill X see it as acceptable to kill someone for a crime not yet committed. Because many of us have told ourselves that content creators are basically screwing us up the ass and the only way to get them back is to screw them back. By not paying. Voting with your dollars. It is hard to argue with this when for instance game companies seem so deaf to their customers.
Simple example. RPG type games and the invisible helmet option. It is a trivial thing to implement. A checkbox on the config screen that does or does not render the helmet so you can have the stats but also can see the face of the character you spent ages creating. Believe it or not but it matters to same sad people like me.
Any game coder who can confirm this? Oh hell, it ain't hard, kiddies on the net have implemented it within a few days of release with no toolkit. Skyrim is just the latest offender. And it is not as if they didn't have a warning. Dragon Age had the same problem AND again, it was users that had to fix it.
Hell Bethseda doesn't even SELL the collectors edition in my region. Just buying the regular edition instead will not send a signal to them. Neither will downloading the game but at least it saves me 40 bucks. They upset about me downloading. Me upset about NOT being able to spend a 140 bucks AND getting a buggy game with missing basic options that by now the industry should have figured out.
What all this ranting is supposed to lead to is that it is very hard to change peoples mind once they are made up. How many of you think it is okay to litter? Okay, most probably said no. How many of those smoke and do NOT throw their cigarette away whereever it damn well pleases them? Now, to clean up this pollution, each cigarette will have a 1 dollar charge added to it to clean up after your filthy addict ass. Agree?
No? But that is what the copyright charge on blank media is.
The only thing that charge did and a litter charge on cigarettes will do, is convince people they are now entitled to commit the offence they paid a fine for.
The cat is out of the bag and as any cat owner knows, it is impossible to put the cat back in.
Re: (Score:3)
The only thing that charge did and a litter charge on cigarettes will do, is convince people they are now entitled to commit the offence they paid a fine for.
What publishers need to do is to affect a shift in attitude. People need to be made to feel that wanton piracy is socially unacceptable. Here's what producers have done towards this goal:
1) Lobby for levies (as you mentioned) which force the guilty and innocent alike to pay
2) Push for increasingly restrictive laws and the lengthening of copyright terms
3) Laughable and insulting anti-piracy adverts included with my purchases. No, I would not steal a car, but I do not consider it wrong to download a torrent o