The other news of the day of course it how iiNet beat the rap and won their case against them alleging that they were responsible for their clients' piratical downloading behaviour.
The Australian film and television industry has lost a case against a major internet service provider whose customers downloaded pirated movies and television programs.
The case against iiNet was filed in the Federal Court by a number of applicants including Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network.
The legal action followed a five-month investigation by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.
The companies claimed iiNet infringed copyright by failing to stop users engaging in illegal file sharing.
But today the Federal Court in Sydney ruled in the internet service provider's favour.
Justice Dennis Cowdroy said it was "impossible" to find against iiNet for what its users did.
"It is impossible to conclude that iiNet has authorised copyright infringement ... (it) did not have relevant power to prevent infringements occurring," he said.
The judge ordered the studios to pay the court costs.
Bummer. To be perfectly honest, I can't really make a case that illegal downloaders are hurting Australian film makers per se because the films that have been made are such also-rans that it's hard to justify they charge the same sort of moneys as say Hollywood fodder. That being the case, this was a suit brought by distributors of one media against the apparent alternative distributor that is breaking their monopoly of distribution for allowing these pirated films to flow freely.
You can see that the distributors had a case on the basis of the copyrights infringed, but once again they've failed to couch the issue in a way that would stop the piracy.
It's been this blog's contention for awhile that the Cinema ticket itself has become overpriced and that this has changed the priority the public places on the cinema experience, as opposed to say, the gaming arcade experience or the music experience or even the console game experience.
Put another way, the disposable income of the market can only be split in a limited number of ways. By insisting on a high price, the Movie industry is insisting on a greater share of the disposable income pie. If the audience agrees with it, then you have 'Avatar' Box Office receipts. If they don't it's bit-torrent downloads of such dog movies as 'All About Steve'.
To be brutally honest, not everything made for the screens deserves a marquee price at the exhibitor's end. The audience is saying "no, we don't think 'All About Steve' or 'Funny People' or anything with Ricky Gervais in it, is an equivalent experience of joy/pleasure/fun when compared to 'Avatar'."
The quick answer is it's not iiNet's problem that the market thinks your product is worth only a pirate download. You should make much more of 'Avatar' and much, much, much fewer of 'All About Steve' et al. The bottom line is that Hollywood, like the Music business before it has been disrespecting the audience/consumer for a long time and is now paying the price for it, by getting disrespected right back.
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