In 2015, chasing illegal downloaders backfired— and VPN were the winners 28 December 2015, by David Glance

to the Australian Federal Court to ask them to force a group of Internet Service Providers to hand over the real names and addresses of the people associated with those Internet addresses.

The LLC (DBC), representing Voltage Pictures, succeeded in persuading an Australian court to force a group of Internet Service Providers to hand over the identities of 4,726 customers.

But it was a pyrrhic victory for DBC. The judge, Justice Nye Perram, imposed conditions on the

specific way in which DBC could approach these customers. In particular, DBC would be required to Downloads continue. Credit: GotCredit/flickr, CC BY-NC put up a AUD $600,000 bond before receiving the customers names and addresses. DBC was also expected to have any letter they planned to send to these customers approved by the Federal Court. For Voltage Pictures, producers of the movie Justice Perram was concerned that DBC would Dallas Buyers Club, extracting substantial fines resort to "speculative invoicing" which DBC had from a large number of Australians who been doing in other countries, threatening ruinous downloaded their movie illegally should have been fines unless accused downloaders settled for some relatively straightforward. They had used the model commonly unspecified amount. in other countries successfully and Australia had politicians and a legal framework that supported Unfortunately for DBC, their attempts to get letters the protection of intellectual property. approved by the Federal Court met with rejection each time. At one point DBC tried to convince the The problem was, not only did they not get what Court to allow them to approach a small number of they wanted from the courts but the plan has the downloaders in return for a reduction of the backfired and Australians are still downloading but original $600,000 bond to just $60,000. This was have got much better at with a public who are not rejected as well, in part because DBC still wanted only still downloading but have also gotten much to charge people who it deemed as having better at covering their tracks. uploaded the a "worldwide non-exclusive distribution agreement" which could have been as Why did it go wrong for Voltage Pictures? much as tens of thousands of dollars. Finding the Internet addresses of the downloaders Justice Perram was obviously eager to wrap the was relatively easy. Voltage used a German proceedings up and put a deadline of the 11th company Maverickeye to simply monitor people February 2016 on the case unless DBC decided to who were "torrenting" the movie Dallas Buyers try a different approach. Club during two months of 2014. In the meantime, VPN use increased and Armed with the Internet addresses, they then went downloading continues

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Meanwhile of course, Australians turned to using Source: The Conversation Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology to cover their tracks when downloading and try and prevent any future DBC-like company coming after them. VPN usage was also been driven by the launch of Netflix in Australia and the discovery by most users that US content, enabled through the use of a VPN, was far more extensive than the current limited offering of Australian licensed content. Although technically not something that should be allowed by Netflix, the use of a VPN to circumvent "geolocking" of content has so far been tolerated by them.

There has been an alleged drop in people reporting that they pirate content. Only 16% of those pirating less often claimed it was to do with a fear of getting caught. This was despite the fact that 51% of the people who admitted to pirating, knew about the case brought by DBC. 33% of people who are pirating less are doing so because they have access to content through services like Netflix.

The moving value of movies

The irony of the entire story is that it is now possible to watch Dallas Buyers Club on Netflix legally and essentially for free as part of a free trial account. It is unsurprising that people associate little consequence to downloading a movie when the only thing determining the value is the length of time from the movie's release date. This makes DBC's quest to make examples of downloaders as a deterrent to others become even more ineffective the more time passes.

Companies like and Netflix understand the dynamic of distributing content globally at an affordable price. As they increasingly become the producers of this content, companies like Voltage Pictures, and the geolocked distribution mechanisms they rely on to make money will be forced to change their practices to compete. This is far more likely to happen before they have managed to change the public's attitude to downloading content.

This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons- Attribution/No derivatives).

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APA citation: In 2015, chasing illegal downloaders backfired—Netflix and VPN were the winners (2015, December 28) retrieved 30 September 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2015-12-illegal-downloaders- backfirednetflix-vpn-winners.html

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