DBC defeated, no further action

[Aractus]

Well let me point out to Cato that IP laws are in need of reform. Australia actually has an ongoing inquiries relating to IP and how the law could be reformed in this area - but unfortunately we also have international treaties signed decades ago that prevent us from passing sensible reforms at the same time. I do think that reforms are coming, and that we will see countries begin to go their own way here.

Let's give an example. Warner claimed to own the copyright to "Happy Birthday" and they raked in tens of millions of USD in royalties over the years (if not 100 million or more). Just like these companies (publishers) always do - they rort the system until dragged through court. In Australia one example in the early norties was Video Retailers & Assoc. V Warner & Assoc. a case I've referred to lots. But let's get back to their claim to Happy Birthday (see below). They've made untold tens of millions, possibly even hundreds of millions by collecting royalties they aren't entitled to. So what was their punishment - refund everyone, and add statutory damages to each claim for their fraudulent claim of copyright? No. They simply had to set up a USD 14m fund from which to repay people who made claims. What. 14 million? A tiny fraction of the profits they wrongly accrued? That's right.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/298839595/Happy-Settlements

Now here's the wonderful thing about copyright - and why reform is needed. No one knows how long it really lasts, and when corporations claim ownership over the authorship, they appear to last perpetually. But they were designed to be attributed to individual authors. I'll put like this - copyright laws as they were intended would say that the late Michael Jackson is the author of Thriller - but in practise Sony claims they're the author, and that makes the copyright last essentially forever. It would last for 75 years after the death of MJ anyway, but if Sony claims corporate authorship then it lasts for 75 years after the death of Sony - which will never happen, since even if the company one day was liquidated, another company could buy it for $1 and extend copyright until that company goes broke.

So does this mean that you are legally allowed to sing Happy Birthday in public places now that Warner's claim to ownership has been thwarted? NO! Absolutely not. If you do that it's still piracy. Even if you do it in private it's still probably a copyright infringement. What the decision means is that the court was unable to determine who the rightful owner is. And until that person or corporation comes forward to claim ownership over the copyright, you have to assume that it's still in copyright and therefore off-limits to be used publicly.

Herein lies the problem. How did it come to this where copyrights can be attributed to unknown people? Why should they last so long. If it was up to me, copyrights would last between 40 to 50 years and then would enter the public domain. We already have a similar provision for patents (which last 17-20 years), and evidence has shown that limiting the duration is essential for both protecting the ideals of competition, and innovation.

You might say "that's well and good, what does that have to do with DBC?" Well, let's go by the Warner decision on Happy Birthday where they were ordered to pay back what amounted to maybe 1 fifth of the profits they made wrongly on someone else's copyright. Let's use that as our benchmark for assessing the DBC damages. The cost to rent the film on Amazon video is USD 3.99. So let's divide that by 5, convert to AUD and we get $1.12. That's the amount that each Australian should be asked to pay if they illegally downloaded the film.

So let's have a look at one of their real-world letters they (DBC LLC) send out in the USA:



“Considering the large expense it incurs to enforce its rights, and further that some cases have awarded as much as $22,500 per infringed work, Dallas Buyers Club, LLC feels that asking for Five Thousand Dollars ($5000.00) to settle is very reasonable,” the letter reads. (TorrentFreak)

$5000 when they should be asking for 80c??

To recap the Australian case, DBC LLC went after iiNet and other ISPs in an attempt to gain access to personal information of 4,726 account holders so that they could exploit them by way of "copyright trolling" (speculative invoicing). Justice Perram saw right through their scam, and ordered them to pay the court $600,000 as a security to be held as a bond to ensure they did not behave this way.

Here's an actual quote from Perram: “the Court was not going to open the sluice gates until it saw the proposed correspondence and until DBC satisfied the Court that it was that approved correspondence, and not something else, such as a dead cat, that DBC was going to send to account holders.” which you can read at your leisure here.

DBC then appealed claiming they were entitled to seek further "damages", the court said no - pay up and then you can have access. Then they said they wanted only 10% of the account holder details and were prepared to pay a bond of $60,000, and that they should be entitled to go after additional damages because blah blah blah. Perram said no, and executed an order that would dismiss the case today (11/02/2016) unless appealed. DBC gave up.

It's clear that they didn't simply want to recoup "damages", they wanted to engage in copyright trolling. We're not going to allow that in this country, so fuck off back to your own.