High court gets it (copy)right

Up yours Hollywood. From http://torrentfreak.com/iinet-isp-not-liable-for-bittorrent-piracy-high-court-rules-120420/  (emphasis added)

In what became known as the iiTrial, the marathon four-year legal battle that began in November 2008, a consortium of Hollywood Studios with token Australian representation going under the banner of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) took iiNet to court.
The case navigated several layers of the Australian court system, with iiNet winning the initial ruling and all subsequent appeals, before finally ending up in front the High Court in December last year.
The thrust of the case hung on whether iiNet had willingly authorized the copyright infringements of its customers. Lower courts found that iiNet had no duty to police its own networks, even when AFACT supplied so-called proof of infringement by its customers.
Just moments ago, the High Court unanimously dismissed AFACT’s final appeal.
[...]
The High Court sits at the pinnacle of Australia’s legal system and its rulings cannot be appealed. Today’s decision forms a binding legal precedent on all lower Australian courts and will be taken into consideration by judges in countries with comparable legal systems such as India, Canada and the UK.
All of this factored into the reasoning of AFACT and its chief sponsor the MPAA to take legal action against iiNet, as revealed by US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in November 2011. The US Ambassador to Australia in 2008, Robert McCallum, reported back to Washington that iiNet was chosen because it was judged too small to put up a decent legal fight. In the cable, the Ambassador prophetically cautioned the coming legal tussle could be perceived as “…the giant American bullies [versus] little Aussie battlers….”
AFACT could never have known Wikileaks would out the plot, or that the legal case would so spectacularly backfire. Today’s decision will hurt Hollywood’s copyright enforcement agenda on multiple levels. Alongside the setting of an unwanted legal precedent, AFACT has been dealt a significant public relations blow in its ongoing lobbying efforts in Australia.

[...]
iiNet CEO Michael Malone was keen to stress the importance of the win. “This is a world first case. No case has gone to judgement in the highest court in the land. I’ve had text messages and emails from people from all over the world,” he said.
Mr Malone said he looked forward to finding solutions to content piracy, but said a large part of the problem was content creators’ unwillingness to make their products available in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Expressing a personal fondness for hit US TV series Game of Thrones, Mr Malone lamented he was not able to access the latest episodes of the show legally in Australia

eDiscovery software

Interesting article from NYT at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

E-discovery technologies generally fall into two broad categories that can be described as “linguistic” and “sociological.”
The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”
The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.
Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing “digital anomalies” that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.
For example, it finds “call me” moments — those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter.

An (un)reasonable agreement

I love the idea of the reasonable agreement by the small print project
http://smallprint.netzoo.net/reag/

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