PSA: New anti-piracy laws come into effect September 1st

blackfalcon53 on 14/08/2015 - 13:46
Last edited 14/08/2015 - 14:24

So basically the fall out from the Dallas Buyers Club case and the new Copyright Amendment Act (2015) means that from September 1st 2015 people will start receiving more infringement notices.

Originally most ISP's was protecting you from copyright holders sending you notices, but not anymore.

From September large copyright holder (media companies) will be employing companies to go on torrent trackers and find Australia IP's that are downloading. Then contacting the ISP's and getting them to send infringement notices.

The new rules means:

There is a 3 strike rule, basically meaning on the 3rd infringement notice (from your ISP), your ISP can be asked to hand your (account holders) details over to the any copyright holder alleging a breach. At which point they could sue you.

Note: Once you get your 3rd notice any copyright holder alleging a breach can get your details and the notices do not have to relate to the same copyright holder.

These rules are also prospective. Meaning breaches previous to September 2015 don't count.

On the 3rd strike you can alleged it wasn't you (ie: it was your housemate), but you cannot before then, which sucks.

Avoiding Notices:

Although I don't encourage piracy, these laws do raise serious privacy concerns, so if you were wishing to avoid your details being provided to a 3rd party by your ISP this is how you could do it:

1) Get an ABN and buy your internet as a business. These laws do not apply to businesses.

2) Get a VPN. The tracking will be based off IP addresses in Australia only.

3) Subscribe to an ISP with less an 1000 subscribers (not the best option :P).

Avoiding Liability:

It should be noted if you ever get an infringement notice asking for $1000's that damages in Australia are limited to the loss incurred. So basically if you download a movie you would have to pay the $25 for the movie. The court said said that speculative invoicing (just sending letter to everyone on a hope they pay) was not allowed in Australia, so this won't occur unless you get 3 strikes.

The only time large damages come into it are if your distribute the content… which unfortunately every torrent does. So you could set your seed speed to 0 to avoid more liability.

Also a company will not want to take you to court as there costs would outweigh their benefit unless they can prove it you were uploading… and even then they probably wouldn't.

Internet

Comments

  • fruit on 14/08/2015 - 14:09

    It's "copyright".

    Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015
    Here it is https://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2015A00080

    I doubt sole traders qualify for whatever exemption there is for businesses.

    Someone will have to tell me if this is strict liability (and cite why)

    • blackfalcon53 on 14/08/2015 - 14:27

      Haha very true, my bad (changed).

      Also pretty sure sole traders do receive the exemption as long as their internet is through the business. That's what my Intellectual Property lecturer said :)

  • nomoneynoproblems on 14/08/2015 - 14:12
    +2

    They can get your details but they can't send you invoices just yet. That process is still being reviewed…its still looking a bit better for us though.

    http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/dall…

  • lost69 on 14/08/2015 - 14:32

    I'd said it before, run your own server. Either yourself or pool resources and run it. Or pool resources together and run a tracker yourself off a server and use donations to pay the bills. It isn't that difficult. Off the shelf software can be adjusted with some basic scripts either way.

  • sd224 on 14/08/2015 - 15:40

    A Noob question here:

    Say I buy a VPN service which supposedly promises to keep no logs. For torrenting, Can I consider myself to be safe if I connect to one of their Australian Servers or should I choose one that is outside AU ? Prime reason being that the VPN speeds significantly drops once you choose a server outside the AU region.

    Also, as the law seems to exclude business users, does this mean even if they track my IP (owned by the VPN company), they can't ask the VPN provider to divulge the user details ?

    Thanks!

    • TetrisMango on 14/08/2015 - 17:34
      +1

      Yes, buy a VPN service that promises to keep no logs. Yes, YOU would be safe if you connected to one of their Australian servers (the VPN company would get busted if they're not keeping logs).
      The VPN provider, if they received an infringement notice because of something you did, would no doubt disregard it as they wouldn't keep the log of who is responsible for the notice.

  • [Deactivated] on 14/08/2015 - 16:04
    +5

    Relevant: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-14/iinet-dallas-buyers-cl…

    the Dallas Buyers Club LLC just got a pretty big smackdown from the court. They predictably got greedy and tried to implement speculative invoicing by stealth. Thankfully, the Judge wasn't a complete idiot and seen what they were trying to do.

  • Diji1 on 14/08/2015 - 17:58

    1) Get an ABN and buy your internet as a business.

    I'm pretty sure that's illegal. Unless you meet some minimum threshold with regards to operations, I have heard the completely uninformed information that you can "get away" with doing 5 "jobs" a year if you pretend to run an auto-electrician business etc.

    But you can't just get an ABN for the purposes of "internet" and if you do you open yourself up to criminal liability. You weren't even breaking the law when you downloaded the movie for non-commercial purposes.

    • djkizz on 18/08/2015 - 00:18

      I registered for an ABN for the sole purpose of purchasing a .com.au website last year and early this year someone called me to review my eligibility to an ABN. They deemed that my reasoning for having an ABN (I didn't really fight it that hard) was not good enough and it was revoked.

  • bargainmuncher on 14/08/2015 - 20:04

    Would a proxy work? I assume not. Also, what other countries have laws like this because I assume that you can't use a vpn through those countries.

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