Overview
Pirates of the digital kind will be well aware of Village Roadshow's quest to rid the country of internet plundering, with the film company stepping up their efforts in the last year or so. This time twelve months ago, they commenced legal action against one movie streaming site. In October, co-chief executive Graham Burke announced plans to start suing illegal downloaders. A successful bid to stop Australians from accessing The Pirate Bay and four other sites followed in December — and they're just getting started.
In their latest move, the folks responsible for releasing films such as the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts franchises, The LEGO Movie, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and more on our shores have filed a Federal Court application to block 41 additional piracy-enabling culprits. Torrent sites, streaming portals and direct download sites are included, spanning the likes of Demonoid, EZTV, ExtraTorrent, LimeTorrents and Torrent Downloads, as well as CouchTuner, 123Movies, Putlocker, WatchFree and WatchSeries. In many cases, multiple URLs are included for each site.
Given their success last time around, Roadshow wants the next round of bans to be modelled on the last, which didn't include rolling injunctions — that is, the ability to add proxy and mirror sites to the list as they spring up. To combat that inevitable occurrence, they're proposing that ISPs file and affidavit and pay $50 per domain name whenever a new site arises.
For anyone with access to a VPN, this news probably won't drastically alter your content acquiring behaviour. Or, the awareness that the driving force doesn't always keep in step with the rest of the globe when it comes to releasing big films. Indeed, one of Roadshow's most eagerly awaited titles of the year — The LEGO Batman Movie — arrives on Aussie screens more than a month and a half after most of the world. In a nation already known to swashbuckle when it comes to timely access to new films and TV shows, that might just send them flocking to their computers rather than the cinema.
Via Computerworld. Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.