Internet piracy cafe cops hefty fine

A Sydney internet café has been hit with an $82,000 fine and is now forced to forfeit computer equipment after it was involved in a massive intellectual copyright infringement scam.

The café even sold 60 gigabyte hard drives so visitors could transfer pirated content and then take it away with them. The café was raided by the Australian Federal Police and The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft on 18 December 2007.

AFACT and Music Industry Piracy Investigations says their investigations “confirmed that the café was charging hourly fees for customers to view infringing movies and music and selling storage devices with capacities of up to 60GBs (capable of storing over 40 movies and hundreds of music files) which customers were using to copy infringing music, movies and TV shows”.

Neil Gane, AFACT director of operations, says: “It is satisfying to see sentences handed down which properly reflect the damage operations like this do to rights owners and the 50,000 Australians working in the film and TV industries.”