John Linton, chief of ISP Exetel, said that his company had been approached by US film distributor Lightning Entertainment who were demanding the identities of around 150 of the ISP’s subscribers who had allegedly downloaded the movie “Kill The Irishman”.

The front company carrying out this work are called Movie Rights Group (MRG), headed by New Zealand-born brothers Matthew Wade Clapham and Richard Dean Clapham. They and Lightning Entertainment are connected to a pornographic empire called New Frontier Media, which sparked speculation that Australia would soon be flooded with settlement requests on adult movies, as is currently happening in the United States.

Well, if that indeed happens, it appears that MRG won’t get much cooperation from John Linton’s Exetel.

In a post on his private blog (as reported by Delimiter), Linton doesn’t hold back on his feelings for these copyright trolls.

“The appearance of scum like the Movie Group [has] forced Exetel to have to consider the base ways we operate the core systems of our business, simply because we must now consider which is the greater of the evils our current society has forced us to confront,” Linton wrote.

Although MRG won’t be on Linton’s Christmas card list this year, he is careful not to endorse copyright infringements carried out by his subscribers. But this CEO has made his judgment about who deserves his company’s support.

“In this case, it is do we go out of our way to protect those of our customers who knowingly and willfully steal other people’s property or do we allow them to be exposed to even scummier elements of our society …who might be able, amazingly and disappointingly, to use the Australian court system to allow them to be blackmailed?”

So what options are there to scupper the plans of MRG? According to Linton, his company will “almost certainly” invest a serious amount of money in order to render their systems unfriendly to trolls.

“So by the end of this week copyright theft by some percentage of our customers will cost Exetel something over $200,000 to ensure blackmailing scum can’t target our law-breaking customers,” added the Exetel chief.

While it is extremely rare for an ISP to stand up for its customers so publicly, it is not unheard of. In opposition to the country’s IPRED legislation, two Swedish ISPs – Bahnhof and Tele2 – stopped logging IP addresses handed out to their customers, thus thwarting any rightsholder request for information.

However, while the Swedish ISPs are completely within their legal rights to take this action (local law doesn’t require logs to be kept) the situation in Australia is unclear. What Exetel is spending $200,000 on is yet to be revealed but whatever it is will be watched closely not only by trolls, but by U.S. rightsholders too.

Whatever “core business systems” change Exetel has in mind to scupper MRG also has the potential to neutralize both Hollywood and the recording industry. And they won’t like that, not one little bit.

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

From there threaten legal action, but offer to settle for less money than it would cost to defend. Profit.

And now this controversial plague has spread to Australia.

According to John Linton, chief of ISP Exetel, his company has been approached by US film distributor Lightning Entertainment who were brandishing a list of some 150 IP addresses from where their movie “Kill The Irishman” is said to have been shared. This is reportedly just part of the 9,000 Australian-based infringements the company is said to be pursuing.

As is normal for studios working in this area, Lightning have commissioned a front company to carry out the controversial business of extorting money from alleged infringers. According to Renai LeNay of Delimiter who contacted TorrentFreak this morning, that outfit is called ‘Movie Rights Group’.

In common with other so-called rights groups in this area, Movie Rights Group (MRG) aren’t forthcoming about who they are and their domain WHOIS has been anonymized. However, LeNay did manage to track down their vice president of sales and marketing Gordon Walker who appears to have been very open about the company’s motives.

“Everybody knows that the Internet is the ultimate unkillable beast,” he told LeNay.

Going on to describe Movie Rights Group as “a commercial solution” to what had previously been seen as a legislative problem, Walker adds that on a chaotic information superhighway “You’ve got to have policemen and women in cars” dealing with infringement.

MRG, it seems, will be handing out the speeding tickets via their friends at Lloyds Solicitors law firm. Question is, will Australians roll over and pay their fines, or stand strong and call their bluff? Time will tell.

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