The Federal Court has dismissed the appeal made by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft against telco iiNet, ruling the company did not authorise copyright infringements committed by its members.
Costs of the trial will be determined at a future date. It is unknown at this stage whether AFACT will appeal to the High Court.
iiNet chief executive Michael Malone said in a statement the decision was welcomed.
“Today’s judgment again demonstrates that the allegations against us have been proven to be unfounded.”
“We urge the Australian film industry to address the growing demand for studio content to be delivered in a timely and cost effective manner to consumers…”
AFACT attempted to prove that iiNet had actually authorised infringements made by customers, but the court has ruled in iiNet’s favour, upholding a previous ruling made nearly 12 months ago.
However, the decision was not unanimous and one judge dissented.
The case is a landmark battle and is being closely watched by copyright and legal experts. The decision serves as an example for other courts on whether ISPs are legally liable for the copyright violations of their customers.
The primary judge concluded “there was no authorisation by iiNet of the acts of infringement that were committed by iiNet users” in the official ruling.
“That was sufficient to dispose of the proceeding. However, his Honour also dealt with the other issues.”
The court also found that each film cited by AFACT as being copied illegally was made available only once, rejecting an approach that sought to view pieces of each BitTorrent file as separate infringements.
The primary judge concluded that the person responsible for determining the content of the communication is the iiNet user who chooses a particular .torrent file, connects to the swarm and, over time, electronically transmits, to that swarm, the file and the pieces that are received.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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