Australian ISP Defies Movie Industry, Protects Its Customers in Court

iiNet has been doing what hasn’t been the norm lately for numerous ISPs. Australia’s 3rd largest ISP had a very protective stand towards its BitTorrent-using broadband customers when it faced trial in Federal Court.

The plaintiff s are quite a few – represented by The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) – namely: Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment , Village Roadshow, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation , Sony Pictures Entertainment, Disney Enterprises, Inc. and the Seven Network, and the reason for suing iiNet is the latter’s tolerant behavior towards those subscribers who use its network to download unauthorized content.

However, the Australian ISP did not break under pressure and revealed no information that would have incriminated any of its customers.

Moreover, adopting an active stanza, iiNet also questioned the notion of ‘making copyrighted material available’ through a transfer such as peer-to-peer under Australian copyright law and said that if a person only shares a segment of a file that BitTorrent has split into several other files, then it would be arguable that the person in question is liable of copyright infringement.

The Federal Court date for the iiNet trial is due October 5th.

We’ll keep you posted.