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The Copyright Amendment (Service Providers) Bill 2017 is currently before the Australian Parliament. It proposes to extend the copyright safe harbours to a limited category of other 'service providers': organisations assisting persons with a disability; libraries; archives; 'key cultural institutions'; educational institutions.

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...

Cooper and his hosting provider, Comcen, were liable for authorising infringements by users of his website, mp3s4free.net, which linked to infringing MP3 files on third-party websites. The index was populated by links submitted by users, but no infringing material was stored or communicated by Cooper or ComCen. The court found that Cooper had the power to prevent infringement because he could have not provided his website in the first place (Branson J) or could have not accepted or subsequently disabled and removed links to infringing content (Kenny J). Second, the relationship between Cooper and users was commercial, because Cooper benefitted financially from sponsorship and advertisements on the website which directly increased with the volume of infringing content. Finally, the court held that Cooper did not take...

Sharman, who operated the Kazaa filesharing platform, were found liable for authorising the infringements of its users. The court held that Sharman knew that the Kazaa system was primarily used to share copyright material. Infringing activity attracted more visitors to the Kazaa site, which benefitted Sharman through advertising revenue. Although there was no Kazaa central server through which Sharman could control users’ activities, the court held that Sharman had the power to prevent infringements because it could have forced an upgrade of the software to inhibit infringement. The court considered, for example, that a keyword filter could have been implemented, or Sharman could have flooded users’ search results with files containing only copyright infringement warnings. Since Sharman had the power to take these...