The country is currently grappling with its piracy issues and while there’s hardly a consensus of opinion right now, most of the region’s rightsholders feel that suing the general public isn’t the way to go. It’s painful for everyone involved and doesn’t solve the problem.

That said, US-based Dallas Buyers Club LLC are not of the same opinion. They care about money and to that end they’re now attempting to obtain the identities of iiNet users for the purpose of extracting cash settlements from them.

Yesterday additional information on the case became available. An Optus spokeswoman told SMH that it had been contacted by Dallas Buyers Club about handing over subscriber data but its legal representatives had backed off when it was denied. The movie outfit didn’t even try with Telstra – but why?

So-called copyright trolls like the easiest possible fight and through iiNet they know their adversaries just that little bit better. According to Anny Slater of Slaters Intellectual Property Lawyers, documents revealed in the ISP’s earlier fight with Village Roadshow show that Telstra could well be a more difficult target for discovery.

The business model employed by plaintiffs such as Dallas Buyer’s Club LLC (DBCLLC) requires a minimum of ‘difficult’ since difficulties increase costs and decrease profits. To that end, part of the job of keeping things straightforward will fall to DBCLLC’s lawfirm, Sydney-based Marque Lawyers.

Unfortunately for DBCLLC, Marque Lawyers have already shot themselves in the foot when it comes to convincing DBCLLC’s “pirate” targets to “pay up or else.”

In 2012, Marque published a paper titled “It wasn’t me, it was my flatmate! – a defense to copyright infringement?” which detailed the company’s stance on file-sharing accusations. The publication provided a short summary of cases in the US where porn companies were aiming to find out the identities of people who had downloaded their films, just as Dallas Buyers Club – Marque’s clients – are doing now.

“To find out the actual identities of the users, the [porn companies] asked the Court to force the ISPs to reveal the names and addresses of each of the subscribers to which the IP addresses related. The users went on the attack and won,” Marque explained.

And here’s the line all potential targets of Dallas Buyers Club and Marque Lawyers should be aware of – from the lawfirm’s own collective mouth.

“The judge, rightly in our view, agreed with the users that just because an IP address is in one person’s name, it does not mean that that person was the one who illegally downloaded the porn.

As the judge said, an IP address does not necessarily identify a person and so you can’t be sure that the person who pays for a service has necessarily infringed copyright.

This decision makes a lot of sense to us. If it holds up, copyright
owners will need to be a whole lot more savvy about how they identify and pursue copyright infringers and, perhaps, we’ve seen the end of the mass ‘John Doe’ litigation.”

So there you have it. Marque Lawyers do not have faith in the IP address-based evidence used in mass file-sharing litigation. In fact, they predict that weaknesses in IP address evidence might even signal the end of mass lawsuits.

Sadly they weren’t right in their latter prediction, as their partnership with Dallas Buyers Club reveals. Still, their stance that the evidence is weak remains and will probably come back to bite them.

The document is available for download from Marque’s own server. Any bill payers wrongly accused of piracy by the company in the future may like to refer the lawfirm to its own literature as part of their response.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

LeMay revealed that a lawfirm has written a series of letters to major Aussie ISPs asking that they hand over the personal details of individuals said to have downloaded and shared their clients’ copyright material without permission.

After confirming with several sources, Delimiter revealed that the company in question is Sydney-based law firm Marque Lawyers.

So far, several of the ISPs contacted have informed Marque that they will not be handing over the information requested. In response the law firm said it is considering using the courts to force them to do so.

Delimiter contacted Marque both by telephone and email yesterday morning requesting an interview, but when we spoke with LeMay last night nothing had yet been heard back. However, when that call does come it is likely to be an uncomfortable one.

Yesterday morning, just after the Delimiter article went live, a tipster sent TorrentFreak an interesting document. Titled “It wasn’t me, it was my flatmate! – a defense to copyright infringement?” the paper, a newsletter published by Marque themselves, details the company’s stance on file-sharing accusations.

The paper begins with a potted history of the Joel Tenenbaum case in the United States but gets the facts wrong straight from the beginning.

“You may have heard that the US Supreme Court recently refused to hear the appeal of a college student who was ordered to pay $675K in damages for illegally downloading and redistributing thousands of songs through BitTorrent,” the Marque paper begins, wrongly mentioning BitTorrent and the number of songs in the case.

The company then moves on to the big issue of the day – U.S.-based companies who write to ISPs in the hope of identifying alleged pirates so that cash settlements can be obtained. This is where it gets awkward – really awkward.

Referencing a previous case in New York, Marque notes that a court refused to hand over the personal details of Internet subscribers to the plaintiff.

“The judge, rightly in our view, agreed with the users that just because an IP address is in
one person’s name, it does not mean that that person was the one who illegally
downloaded the porn,” Marque Lawyers write.

“As the judge said, an IP address does not necessarily identify a person and so you can’t
be sure that the person who pays for a service has necessarily infringed copyright.”

The law firm then goes on to back up its assertion with scenarios in which the account holder would not be the infringer.

“For example, in an office or at home, where there is a WiFi connection, only one IP
address will be allocated to that wireless connection. This means that every user of each
device (computer, iPad, iPhone etc) connected to that WiFi connection will use the same
IP address. Even a random passerby accessing the WiFi network would be using the
same IP address,” the company explains.

“This decision makes a lot of sense to us. If it holds up, copyright owners will need to be a whole lot more savvy about how they identify and pursue copyright infringers and, perhaps, we’ve seen the end of the mass ‘John Doe’ litigation,” they conclude.

The big question is whether Marque’s clients have indeed become “more savvy” or whether they still intend to rely on IP address-only evidence. If so, the Marque Lawyers document (which can be downloaded here and also from Marque’s own server) will come in very handy for letter recipients.

If the lawfirm writing the letter doesn’t believe that the evidence is up to much, there’s no reason the recipient should either. A simple denial is going to be difficult to argue with.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.