The extent of iiNet's power was limited to an indirect power to prevent a customer's primary infringement of the appellants' films by terminating the contractual relationship between them. The information contained in the AFACT notices, as and when they were served, did not provide iiNet with a reasonable basis for sending warning notices to individual customers containing threats to suspend or terminate those customers' accounts. For these reasons, iiNet's inactivity after receipt of the AFACT notices did not give rise to an inference of authorisation (by "countenancing" or otherwise) of any act of primary infringement by its customers

This final conclusion shows that the concept and the principles of the statutory tort of authorisation of copyright infringement are not readily suited to enforcing the rights of copyright owners in respect of widespread infringements occasioned by peer-to-peer file sharing, as occurs with the BitTorrent system.

The facts of this case are well removed from those which in Moorhouse led Jacobs J[160] to adopt what had been said on the subject of indifference by Bankes LJ in Ciryl [161]. The rhetorical question with reference to what had been said by Bankes LJ, which Whitford J posed in CBS Inc v Ames Records & Tapes Ltd [162], may be asked here:
"Is this again a case of the indifference of somebody who did not consider it his business to interfere, who had no desire to see another person's copyright infringed, but whose view was that copyright and infringement were matters in this case not for him, but for the owners of the copyright? It must be recalled that the most important matter to bear in mind is the circumstances established in evidence in each case."

that media companies cannot simply do whatever they want without going through the appropriate due processes.

Expect to see several SOPA-like variations attempting to be pushed through over the coming years, each attempt with altered and more generic/vague wording that doesn't trigger as many alarm bells.last edited by parabol at 10:51:38 20/Apr/12

Does this mean they pay IInet's legal fees?

How are organisations like this funded? By the artists themselves?

The concurrence seems to place heavy reliance on the fact that AFACT's investigations were incomplete, and their notices to iiNet did not particularise the investigations methodology/evidence and findings. There seems to be an opening for if the copyright owner was to notify a carrier of infringement that sufficiently dealt with these matters, then the carrier may be obliged to act.

Copyright lawyers wont stop and i think its just the beginning because now we have a new bill in the U.S. called CISPA and thats after them trying to get through SOPA, PIPA and ACTA ... all threats to the Internet as we know it. Control of information and lies is paramount to them.

Wouldn't that just be cost prohibitive though? To spend the time and resources on actually verifying that an infringement has taken place beyond logging an IP address connected to the peer network of a torrent would surely cost more than it's worth.

It seems to me that going after the infringer individually is far too expensive which is why they have been trying to assign collective blame to a convenient target, or at least get them to do the work for them. I mean chasing someone for downloading an album worth $20 would surely have to be done on a tight budget!

The funny thing is, if any of those bills had gone through, it would have crippled the Internet and developed a side network that people would use instead

this will push the media companies to step up their lobbying harder than ever to get the laws changed in their favour.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft has used its latest court loss and the impending NBN rollout as a springboard to lobby for legislative reforms on copyright.

AFACT managing director Neil Gane used today's unanimous High Court of Australia judgment against the studios to seek law changes, citing the impending rollout of the National Broadband Network as a second reason to institute a crackdown.

The problem is there is software/hardware out there that can allow ISPs to do statistical analysis of a TCP/IP or UDP stream and fairly reliably guess what kind of traffic it is (encrypted torrents, SSL'd usenet, etc) without having to actually decrypt the data itself which is difficult/impossible in many situations.

All you need is a couple of vague laws sneaked in that require ISPs to monitor for "suspicious" activity like that and be required to warn/disconnect users and then you'll have a fair bit of trouble finding workarounds.