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A LANDMARK JUDGEMENT has just been handed down in Australia regarding the outing of internet pirates.
Federal Court judge Nye Perram has ruled in favour of Dallas Buyers Club LLC’s application requesting that several different Internet Service Provider’s (ISPs) disclose the identities of people alleged to have shared that movie online.
Effectively, 4,700 people whose service was used to download or share Dallas Buyers Club (for which Matthew McConaughey won a comeback Best Actor Academy Award in 2013) will soon be receiving letters from the aforementioned LLC’s (Limited Liability Company) lawyers threatening legal action.
You may ask why this hasn’t happened more often.
It seems the production company behind the legal action, Voltage Pictures, is setting the standard when it comes to actively pursuing internet piracy.
The company, whose other credits include multi-Oscar winner The Hurt Locker and fellow McConaughey vehicle Killer Joe, have been pursuing individuals who have shared their products via torrent clients like BitTorrent for about two years now.
Most of their movies are produced in the mid-budget range of between €15 million and €35 million.
What’s unusual about their legal actions is that they’ve been getting results.
Most of the individual cases they’ve taken in the last year have been settled for amounts in the region of €3,200 – not a lot of money to a movie distributor perhaps, but a lot to you or I.
One particularly active file-sharer in Oregon was forced to settle with Voltage for €13,000 in November last year, while another settled for a no-less gulp-inducing €7,000.
The Australian judgement is slightly tempered by the fact the judge has moved to curtail this manner of ‘speculative invoicing’ (i.e. billing those who have broken the law with no frame of reference) by ruling that any letters issued by the LLC must be run by him first.
“Whether speculative invoicing is a lawful practice in Australia is not necessarily an easy matter to assess,” said Justice Perram.
The judge further ruled that the pirates’ identities not be made public.
So the difference between Australia and the US in this case is a question of quantity over quality – that is, Voltage now has access to the particulars of many thousands of pirates, but how they are to prosecute them financially is not yet clear.
So, with all this going on, what is to stop the likes of Voltage from prosecuting Irish file-sharers?
“The difference comes down to the different legal regimes in each territory and their interpretation of privacy,” says Intellectual Property expert Alistair Payne of Irish law firm Matheson, in conversation with TheJournal.ie.
European privacy law is very different from Australian and American law.
It’s chalk and cheese really. Certainly in America they don’t have the same kind of privacy concepts we have here.
So it isn’t possible for a judge to make such a judgement here, or is it not worth the likes of Voltage’s time?
When it comes down to it European law is far more prescriptive than either Australian or American.
Judges here simply don’t have the same leeway to make judgements of this kind, regardless of whether they’d like to or not.
It seems web pirates on this side of the Atlantic can sleep soundly then, for now at any rate.
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Can’t wait for the inevitable (cash-grab) tribunal into this fiasco is started, with zero accountability to follow.
Whenever it opens the nightmare of access and parking will begin, we have been attending St James Hosp for some weeks now and parking is just mental, I dread to think when the children’s Hosp opens the chaos that will follow.
@Eileen Kelly: and the green party will have a 10 euro charge to drive into the city by then
New parking: 575 will be paying visitor Spaces, 100 spaces will be CHI Social Care Guest Spaces and 319 spaces will be for Staff Parking.
@Ivan Genockey: $20
Rumour has it the children’s hospital will open in October 2054 and closed in 2056 due to being outdated
@Pat Barden: when tallaght hospital opened decades after the plans were drawn up, bed sizes had increased, and the doors needed to be resized. Cant wait to see the snag list on this new white elephant with potential costs of 2.4 billion being floated.
Well done to our Irish writers and our President Mr Higgins for speaking out against the slaughter of innocent lives in Palestine. Please continue to force your opposition to this sensless taking of life.
Anyone in the privelaged position of having access to public persuasion has a moral duty to speak out against this mass murder and not to remain silent.
The thoughts of a sick mind. Go get the help you obviously need.
@Mary Looners: How about the thousands of Palestinians murdered by the terrorist forces of Israel…The thousands murdered by the same Israeli terrorist forces in the refugee camps in Lebanon…Israel a country from lines drawn in the sand by the murderous British empire.
@Dissasociated Follower: Israel is looking for the Final Solution in Gaza over the next few weeks. The final dispersal of the indigenous Palestinian population into Egypt. Speak out against this genocide!
Well I for one am shocked. Shocked I tell you
they need to find a buyer first before they open it.sell it for about 120 million and state “a great day for Ireland”. that’s how these things usually work anyway.
First child patients will be adults by the time it’s open
Why did they not build that out near the M50 on a big site with plenty of parking for everyone. Easy to get to. Brought my elderly father up from Waterford to St James for a scan last week. A major hospital without any parking. Even the set down area was full.
The money pit. They keep shovelling it in…
Bad enough concerning the Children’s Hospital…The event centre in Cork again made a few headlines again a few weeks ago… It’s like Bart Simpson..Are we there yet…Photo in newspaper showed Enda Kenny, Coveney and the future deputy leader of FG Michael Martin. Kenny has gone trainspotting…People looking for Coveney as he has disappeared.. Martin can’t remember the photo… like when he stated there was no bank bailout..Jesus his memory is shot through…As for the event centre…as John Wayne would say ..Until hell freezes over… And BAM riding off into the Sunset
Value for Money for the Citizen. That’s a joke if ever I head one. Beginning to sound like a Communist State.
@Owen Mc: One thing about a communist state ..The incompetent politicians who thought this farce up..Would be up against a wall…And rightly so.
Just before the next General Election. Bronze plaques will be insitu.
Tbf it looks fabulous.
Yep. It’s its only redeeming feature so far
Lol
And it’s not even April’s fools day. How many more OT will have to be refitted out due to incompetence. This hospital will never have enough people to work there to make it a safe place for children.
Hopefully this will open soon and I really hope our children do not have to face the horrors of war that is being faced by so many across the world. Imagine if the hospital was hit by a misfired missile from a local terrorist gang and killed hundreds of its own people. Evidence is mounting and thousands here in Ireland including our politicians have been screaming that is was Israel. Nobody will apologise and try hold the right people accountable. Hatred of the people of Israel will continue and openly, because it’s acceptable. Oh and a tip to those people who have posters saying ‘queers for Palestine’ please please make your way to gaze and hold up those posters, they will just love you.
@Chris Thaunton: Could you elaborate on your statement “evidence is mounting”. If you have evidence as to who perpetrated this dispicable act of terror on a hospital packed with injured people, would you kindly share it with the group please.
@Chris Thaunton: I would like to know if you think that blowing children to smitherings in their hospital beds is a more effective and moral way of exterminating children than beheading because the people in the middle east who kill children indiscriminately can’t seem to make their minds up as to the most acceptable way to destroy a child.
You seem to be determinably accepting of the statements made by the Isreali forces on who carried out this act of terror. I worry that you may loose your ability to question obdjectively every forcibly applied statement or convincing claim that beats itself upon your eardrum. I fear that you may be led down the path of perpetual propoganda.
@Chris Thaunton: did you have to bring Israel into this. Very few irish people give a dam about Israel.
@Joe Kelly: Hi Joe, that is blatantly obvious.
@Dissasociated Follower: Hi there, yes, the mounting evidence is even now being transmitted to us on our very own state media. If they are willing to show it, that says a hell of a lot. Unfortunately the crime scene has been tampered with, to conceal evidence no doubt. There also an intercepted voice conversation that adds to the evidence. Available online from your trusted sources. I love group therapy.
@Chris Thaunton: Thanks Chris. I’ll check it out and if I can allow myself to be convinced by the evidence you mention I’ll revert back.
I’m sure though that long after our bones have been fossilised the truth will come out.
Sure it will. Sure its only taxpayers money anyway.
That would be the 30th of September so
This is worse than the paul vi snek hall architecture from the Vatican article above. Eye of the divil as opposed to Our Lady’s.. Blow it up, and redo it without the all seeing eye
Was this project even put up for bid or was it just all day work.
have your say