Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland has called industry stakeholders, including ISPs and the online video, movie and music industries to a meeting next month to discuss ways of combating online piracy.Advocacy groups invited to represent copyright holders at the talks are said to include the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft and the newly formed Digital Entertainment Alliance Australia.

They will face off with ISPs plus representatives from Telstra, the Internet Industry Association and the Communications Alliance. Optus may also attend.

The meeting comes as AFACT prepares for a High Court appeal against a recent Federal Court judgment that rejected AFACT’s claim that ISP iiNet had failed to stop piracy by users it had identified. AFACT had sought to persuade the court that iiNet authorised copyright infringement by refusing to pass on to customers breach notices generated by AFACT investigators.

McClelland earlier this year said that, while the litigation was important, it was “unlikely to give rise to an industry-wide solution to the problem of unauthorised file-sharing”.

A Telstra spokesman yesterday confirmed that the carrier would be attending McClelland’s September meeting.