Dallas Buyers Club won’t appeal piracy ruling, but may still seek large damages

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blog It’s looking like Dallas Buyers Club won’t appeal the ruling handed down last month of Federal Court Justice Perram in the Internet piracy case against iiNet and a number of other ISPs. However, the company hasn’t given up its attempts to sue Australians for mega-dollars. iTnews quotes Marque Lawyers managing director Michael Bradley this morning (we recommend you click here for the full article):

“Whether an individual should be liable for damages based on other activity is not a closed subject,” Bradley said.

In essence, what we’re seeing here is that Dallas Buyers Club and Marque Lawyers have decided to more or less accept Justice Perram’s ruling, but may be seeking to rework their approach to alleged copyright infringers to still target them for facilitating uploading of content online (as occurs in a BitTorrent situation, for example), rather than merely targeting them for downloading material.

It’s further not clear whether DBC thinks there is still a way to tack on punitive damages — high damage fines which represent a deterrence to future piracy — although that is probably a tougher ask.

I can’t say I’m surprised that DBC is wriggling around within the terms of the judgement which the Federal Court handed down … and I also wouldn’t be surprised if the group was currently speaking to politicians about the judgement. We saw that kind of behaviour directly after landmark iiNet victories on piracy matters in the Federal and High Courts. This game is not over — not by any measure.

Image credit: Dallas Buyers Club

3 COMMENTS

  1. Typical modern corporate response: the courts say the law doesn’t give us what we want, so let’s go buy some politicians, and they can write new laws that do…

  2. Beyond the scope of this article, and probably well beyond the resources of this modest media outlet, but is any one checking to see if it is known who was the original source of the distributed material in question? So as to ascertain that this isn’t a similar profit making scheme as that used by the now infamous US Law Firm “Prenad Lawyers”.

  3. They are wiggling and drawing a long bow, to make the claims against people a) stick and b) be financially beneficial. Effectively, an attempt to ‘bulk-bill’ based on the notion a claim might be for several titles, not just one.

    Because chasing people for the cost of a single copy, plus some form of serving fee, isn’t likely to be financially sane. And really despite all the noise, it’s not the consuming part of the situation that’s ever been the crux of the matter (it’s just a nice emotive way to grab attention).

    It’s always, always falls back to distribution. That’s the act they are so determined to chase people for. It’s no surprise, then, that DBC are once again attempting to find a legal avenue to target said actions; because that’s where the money is.

    Speculative billing is based entirely on that concept.

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