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In similar facts to the earlier 2012 decision, Mr Trkulja again brought a claim in defamation against Google for defamatory search results. Google Inc. sought to set aside service outside the jurisdiction. The Victorian Supreme Court of Appeal held that Google had established that Mr Trkulja had no real prospect of success at trial. The Court largely accepted that search results would be 'published' by Google, but found that the material complained about was not likely to carry defamatory imputations. The Court found that ‘the ordinary, reasonable search engine user’ would not assume that Trkulja was a convicted criminal merely because his image was displayed in search results that also returned images of underworld figures, police officers, and crime reporters. Trkulja has appealed the decision to the High Court of...

In a subsequent decision following Dallas Buyers Club LLC v iiNet Limited (see below), the court rejected Voltage Pictures’ draft demands as unreasonable and excessive. The court was satisfied Voltage could ask for the costs of a single copy of the film and an appropriately proportioned fee to recover its legal costs so far. However, the court rejected attempts to multiply these fees, potentially thousands of times, for other BitTorrent peers to whom the subscriber may have transmitted parts of the film. The court also rejected the claim for monetary penalties based on infringements of other copyright owners’ rights that account holders may have admitted to. >

The Federal Court of Australia ordered preliminary discovery from iiNet and five other Australian ISPs of the information of 4,726 account holders of IP addresses believed to have infringed copyright in the 2012 film Dallas Buyers Club. The Court was satisfied that there was sufficient evidence for a preliminary discovery application. In making the order, the court imposed several conditions on the applicants. First, the information of the account holders could only be used for the purposes of recovering compensation for the infringements and should not otherwise be disclosed without the leave of the Federal Court. Second, a draft of any letter the applicants intend to send to account holders associated with the identified IP addresses must be submitted to the court.

An industry-negotiated graduated response Code was submitted to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for registration as an industry code under the Telecommunications Act 1997 (Cth) on 8 April 2015. The Code introduces a Copyright Notice Scheme that requires Internet Service Providers to pass on warnings to residential fixed account holders who are alleged to have infringed copyright. The scheme consists of an escalating series of infringements notices. These notices include educational material designed to deter copyright infringing behaviour and educate consumers about available and lawful content alternatives. Upon receipt of a third and final notice within a 12-month period, account holders may challenge the validity of the allegations by having them independently reviewed by a panel. The Code...

Bleyer brought a claim in defamation against Google on the basis of its organic search results. The New South Wales Supreme Court dismissed the claim on summary judgment on the basis that Google is not a publisher of its search results, at least prior to notification of a complaint. Google’s production of the search results involves no human input, apart from the creation of its search algorithm. The Court rejected the conclusion reached in Trkulja (below) and explicitly adopted the UK position on this point (Metropolitan International Schools Ltd v Designtechnica Corporation 2009 EWHC 1765; Tamiz v Google Inc 2012 EWHC 449).