The draft letter, which Dallas Buyers Club LLC was ordered to submit for court approval along with its proposed phone script, asked alleged pirates questions about their salaries, if they’ve served in the military, their previous torrenting history, how many times Dallas Buyers Club was downloaded off the back of their torrent and more.
Advertisement
The Federal Court has ruled Dallas Buyers Club LLC and Voltage Pictures LLC must pay a $600,000 bond before they can receive the names and addresses of internet users who illegally downloaded their movie.
The potential accused people in this case should be sending letters of thanks to Justice Perram and to the lawyers of the ISPs for stopping a practice which would have opened the floodgates for predatory companies seeking to make money from consumers under the guise of the law.
The ruling was greeted with surprise across the industry, with legal pundits regarding Justice Perram’s decision as big win for both ISPs and customers. But because DBC doesn’t have an Australian presence, Perram worries that it could just write whatever it wants to iiNet’s subscribers and escape contempt of court action.
On Friday, new conditions, including a bond amount, were imposed by Justice Nye Perram on DBC so the company could not make profit from infringers or use fear-mongering tactics to secure damages.
The ruling will prevent the company from so-called speculative invoicing.
However, Dallas Buyer’s Club also wanted to claim damages from the alleged pirates that could be much larger – based on the idea that each alleged pirate would be helping to distribute the film through the BitTorrent file-sharing platform, as well as punitive damages to deter others from conducting similar copyright infringement.
Under a confidentiality order, DBC detailed the specific monetary demands.
“A claim for the cost of an actual purchase of a single copy of the Film for each copy of the Film downloaded”. DBC said it would seek to recover a one-off license fee from each individual that had uploaded parts of the movie to other BitTorrent users.
Justice Perram dismissed the application from DBC. If DBC chooses to agree by these terms, and agrees to pay the AUD$600,000, local ISPs will be still be required to hand over account holder information.
A claim for damage related to the cost to DBC for obtaining the alleged infringers details.
Advertisement
More information on the court’s decision is expected to be released later in the day. Perram picked that sum because he feels that if DBC decides to breach the court’s orders, the bond ought to be “at a level which will ensure that it will not be profitable for it to do so”.
