The rights owners of the Dallas Buyers Club film have finally thrown in the towel on its piracy court case against ISP iiNet. Dallas Buyers Club LLC (DBC LLC) launched legal action against iiNet and several smaller ISPs in late 2014 to acquire details on their subscribers that were suspected of illegally downloading the movie. The rights holders eventually lost the court case but had the right to appealed. Now the court battle is officially over.
DBC LLC wanted to get the personal details of alleged movie pirates in order to pursue damages for copyright theft. The court battle went back and forth for several months but was eventually thrown out of court but DBC LLC could appeal the decision. The deadline to do so is 12pm today.
The law firm representing DBC LLC told iTNews that its client will no longer be pursuing the right to access the details of the 4726 individuals suspected of pirating Dallas Buyers Club.
“It’s certainly a disappointing outcome for [DBC LLC]. It doesn’t do anything to mitigate the infringement that’s going on — it’s not a particularly satisfactory outcome from that point of view,” Marque Lawyers managing partner Michael Bradley told iTNews.
The decision to dismiss the court case was lauded by privacy groups and individuals who feared the case would set a precedent for other copyright holders to aggressively take legal action against alleged movie pirates.
[Via iTNews]
Comments
3 responses to “It’s Over: Dallas Buyers Club Gives Up On iiNet Piracy Court Case”
FINALLY!
I understand that piracy is a problem, but DBC LLC’s intention was to make a profit from collecting from the individuals.
If the request was say: $20 for each download + $20 admin costs (or similar) it would’ve been passed through.
More likely it was DBC-LLC’s bean counters that put the breaks on this.
That or whether they’ve recouped the loses from the media circus’ it causeed, gaving it a lot of free publicity…
DBC LLC and Marque Lawyers only have themselves to blame, they had the chance (well they had multiple chances) to have a profound effect. But they chose the path of revenge and were essentially breaking a lawful order (in a way id have preferred them to not have had to have the letter vetted before being sent out, then they get slapped with million dollar fines/jail time for disobeying a direct order of the court and have the letters rescinded in perpetuity for their belligerence).