Good news for the Internet in Australia, iiNet was found to be innocent of promoting copyright infringement by not taking action against users suspected of breaking copyright law.

Recently the big movie studios teamed up to take on iiNet, one of Australia’s largest Internet Service Providers for not policing copyright infringement on their network. Currently the movie studios attempt to track peer to peer file sharing and record the IP Addresses of users transferring data related to copyrighted materials. They then track these IP Addresses back to the ISP’s and ask them to forward letters advising users of their breach of copyright law. Some ISP’s pass these letters on while others refuse. Unfortunately the movie studios don’t see this as going far enough and seeing as taking individual users to court is time consuming, expensive, and potentially damaging to the movie studios plans for policing the internet, they’ve decided that their best course of action is to force the burden of monitoring and enforcing copyright law onto the ISP’s.

The major problem with this methodology for cutting down on piracy is that it cuts out the judicial system and gives private companies the responsibility of being both accuser and judge. It’s fundamentally flawed.

In the current case Justice Cowdroy ruled in favour of iiNet - “The evidence establishes that copyright infringement of the applicant’s films is occurring on a large scale … however, such a fact does not necessitate or compel … a finding of authorisation, merely because it is felt that ‘something must be done’ to stop the infringements” (SBS news