The movie industry may have lost its appeal in the AFACT v iiNet case, but it hasn’t given up on moves to compel Internet service providers to take action to prevent known infringements by subscribers to their networks.”While we did not prevail due to the finding of the court on a narrow, technical issue, we did succeed in terms of the court finding in our favour across a range of key issues that we raised,” says AFACT executive director Neil Gane.
He told the Music Industry News network that key findings of last week’s 2-1 decision by the Full Bench of the Federal Court included acknowledgment that ISPs could in certain circumstances be held liable for the known repeat copyright infringements of their customers
He quoted Justice Emmett’s finding that “it does not necessarily follow from the failure of the present proceeding that circumstances could not exist whereby iiNet might in the future be held to have authorised primary acts of infringement.”
Justice Nicolas said: “I do not accept that the adoption of some system providing for the issuing of warnings followed by termination or suspension is not a reasonable step which [iiNet] could have taken.”
