An Australian court on Friday forced makers of the film “Dallas Buyers Club” to cap penalties for illegal downloaders, a ruling welcomed by Internet companies as a “knockout blow” to the controversial tactic of threatening pirates into paying fines.
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More than 4,700 customers of internet providers who illegally downloaded the Hollywood blockbuster Dallas Buyers Club have won a reprieve from the Federal Court of Australia, after the court refused to hand over their details and found the company who owns the rights to the movie is engaged in “speculative invoicing”.
Justice Nye Perram came to the decision as a way to prevent DBC LLC from issuing “speculative invoices” to alleged pirates.
“In those circumstances, I’ve decided that what is presently proposed by Dallas Buyers Club in terms of its correspondence ought not to be permitted”, the Justice said. “Critically, however, it did not make any demand for a sum of money”.
“This brought forth the first draft letter”, Justice Perram wrote.
“The objective of the stay and the Court’s consideration of the correspondence was to ensure that DBC did not engage in what the respondent ISPs referred to as “speculative invoicing”, he stated. “That still left wholly unanswered, however, what it was actually going to do”, Perram said. Having had access to what it is that DBC proposes to demand [under the second and third bullet points] and the potential revenue it might make if it breached its undertaking to the court not to demand such sums, it seems to me that I should set the bond at a level which will ensure that it will not be profitable for it to do so.
“Because DBC has no presence in Australia the Court is unable to punish it for contempt if it fails to honour that undertaking”, he said. “I will set the bond at $600,000 which, if the undertaking is given, is to be lodged by bank guarantee with the Registrar”.
The company proposed demanding four different types of damages from a pirate.
He also immediately dismissed DBC’s desire to claim further damages if it was proven that an infringer was a serial pirate.
In total, that sounds like no small amount. “If matters had rested there I would have given DBC access to the account holder information by lifting the stay”, he said.
Dallas Buyers Club LLC also tallied costs for “additional” (punitive) damages for users alleged to have downloaded many more files other than Dallas Buyers Club without authorisation, as well as damages covering its costs to obtain each alleged infringer’s name.
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Whilst Justice Perram agreed that the Dallas Buyers Club potentially could claim for points [1] and [4], he did not agree that they would be able to ask for the cost of a distribution license or for damages for other copyrighted content that had nothing to do with the movie in question.
