The Internet Wars (copyright campaign) come to ISPs down under

The big movie studios have brought proceedings against iiNet, one of the larger (in a non-Bigpond sort of way) ISPs seeking to impose liability on the ISP for infringing downloading by its subscribers.

The Application is here (pdf) and the Statement of Claim is here (pdf).

Various analyses:

Nic Suzor has a detailed view here

Kim Weatherall here

Australian PC Mag here

The Film Industry outlines its position here

IPRoo carries a quote from the Internet Industry Association’s CEO here.

As you can see from this coverage, this has really set the cat among the pigeons.  The striking thing about this action, however, is that one might have characterised iiNet as a general purpose ISP, not existing just to promote infringing downloads like the Court’s found Mr Cooper’s mp3s4free.com or substantially like Kazaa.

Thus, the distinction propounded by the record companies in Cooper (at [123]) and both questioned and side-stepped by Branson J (at [40]) appears to be very squarely off the table. So, as many of the bloggers note, it is not too much of a stretch to claim that the future of the internet is at stake here.  Will the old Copyright Convergence Group‘s analogy to the postal system – imposing liability only on the person who introduces (posts) the material – be confirmed or will we, through the Courts, turn back into a closed, monitored system?

The ISPs can hardly be surprised:

(a) s 101(1A(c) expressly provides for the development of an industry code to establish norms;

(b) the copyright owners have directly attacked the ISPs in Eire;

(c) the UK government has “brokered” some sort of more “pro-active” role on ISPs too.

No doubt, if the matter goes to trial, we can expect to see a volume of evidence about the volume of iiNet’s P2P traffic vis a vis its other activities and, before then, perhaps some applications for discovery of traffic details.

Given that liability appears to be predicated on authorisation, it will also be particularly interesting to see how the movie producers circumvent the prohibition on intercepting communications over a telecommunications system and, perhaps, (if an ISP is a carriage service provider) the prohibition on use or disclosure of information the contents of any communication carried by a carriage service provider.

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