Village Roadshow to sue hundreds of Australians for piracy

[grimm]

The Federal Court's decision to block dozens of video piracy websites won't be enough to dissuade the film and television industry from pursuing the next target in its war against piracy: the Australian viewers who download shows illegally rather than pay for them.

Australia's largest film producer, Village Roadshow, will go ahead with its plan later this year to slap copyright infringement lawsuits on "hundreds" of viewers who pirate shows, as part of a multi-pronged, industry-wide campaign that will also include trying to get Google to "do the right thing" by copyright owners and stop indexing pirated content, a Village executive said.

42 overseas websites targeted

On Friday, the Federal Court of Australia ordered Telstra, Optus, iPrimus and a host of other internet providers to block access to 42 websites located outside Australia, which were found to be hosting unauthorised copies of movies such as Spider-Man 2, Jurassic World, The Lego Movie and Cinderella, as well as the TV show Shameless.

The Federal Court gave the internet service providers (ISPs) 15 business days to block access to sites such as 123Movies, WatchFree, WatchSeries and MegaShare, as well as any versions of the sites that may appear at different web addresses during the three-year lifetime of the ban.

A consortium of film giants led by Village Roadshow sued the ISPs in March this year, taking advantage of an amendment to the Copyright Act that was passed by the Australian Parliament in 2015, allowing copyright owners to force ISPs to block piracy websites.

That change to the law has already led to Australia's ISPs blocking access to the popular BitTorrent index site The Pirate Bay, forcing those Australians still determined to pirate content to use the proxies of The Pirate Bay that have sprung up with web addresses not initially blocked the the courts, or to use virtual private network (VPN) technology, that effectively bypasses the Australia-wide blocking mechanisms by encrypting the user's connection until it's outside of Australia.

With people still downloading illegally despite the site blocks, it will soon be time to start suing individual viewers, said Graham Burke, chairman of Creative Content Australia, the peak industry body representing the local and multinational film and television industry.

Mr Burke, who is also the co-executive chairman and co-chief executive of Village Roadshow, said his company was already "working up the process" to sue individual copyright infringers "later in the year".

"We will identify people who are stealing our product, we will ask them do they have ill health or dire circumstances, and if they do and undertake to stop, we'll drop the case."

Otherwise Village will "pursue them vigorously and sue for damages".

The US entertainment industry's pursuit of individual infringers last decade led to a public relations catastrophe, when sympathetic citizens such as grandmothers and children were sued for millions of dollars in damages for illegal music downloading – lawsuits that would have ruined the downloaders had the record industry not relented.

Infringers to be pursued for actual losses

But Village would take a much gentler approach, Mr Burke said, pursuing infringers only for the actual losses incurred by the piracy, plus modest costs.

"We will be looking for damages commensurate with what they've done. We'll be saying 'You've downloaded our Mad Max: Fury Road, our Red Dog, and we want $40 for the four movies plus $200 in costs.'"

That's in stark contrast to the action taken by the makers of Dallas Buyers Club in 2014 and 2015, in which individual downloaders in the US were threatened with courts costs of up to $US150,000 if they refused to pay a settlement fee of $US7000, forcing the Federal Court of Australia to intervene to ensure that Australians weren't hit with similar "speculative invoices" when the lawsuits were threatened here.

Telstra, which like the other ISPs didn't oppose the blocking lawsuit except to question who would pay for the sites to be blocked, declined to comment.