The film industry gets a kick up the bum in Australia

The Australian federal court has today turned down an appeal from AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) that sought to overturn an earlier judgement in favour of Australia's second largest ISP, iiNet.

AFACT, which was representing numerous Hollywood studios (including Universal, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures) had alleged that iiNet had not done enough to prevent its users from downloading films and TV shows and thus was guilty of copyright infringement.

After a fractious and hard fought legal battle, iiNet won the trial last year and AFACT has been hard at work in the courts with its appeal, claiming that the original judgement had been wrong in regards to iiNet's capacity and responsibility to prevent online piracy and that the original judgement was “a serious threat to Australia's digital economy.” Some might argue that corporate entities using legal machinations, threats and mouthpiece organisations to impose their will on the internet is something far more dangerous, but whatever.

The Federal court upheld the original judgement, rejecting AFACT's arguments with
Judge Nicholas James commenting; "It cannot be inferred that a person authorises copyright infringement merely because he or she provides another person with communication facilities used by the other person to infringe copyright."

AFACT have the recourse of a further appeal.