Australian ISP employee on booting customers for infringements [ip]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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> > offering copyrighted works for download, the ISP "ought to kick that 
> > subscriber off the system." The approach would be the most radical 
> > worldwide as the proposed removal would presumably come without a court 
> > hearing or other due process.  Given that CRIA lost its file

Hi Declan,

Please remove my name+email from this, if you want to forward it to the 
list.  Also, feel free to edit it as you wish.

The ISP I'm with here in Australia has a similar procedure, however its not 
required by law, nor do I think it is a result of direct industry pressure.

If they receive an infringement notice saying that one of their IP 
addresses has been illegally sharing software/movies (each customer has a 
known fixed IP), they will pass it onto the customer and give them the 
chance to refute it.  If they then receive a second notice about you, you 
get one more chance to deny it.  If you don't successfully refute the 
second notice, they then terminate your contract with no refund.

  http://www.exetel.com.au/a_copyright_infringement.htm

("Churn" is a term for transferring your ADSL connection to another 
provider, with minimum connection downtime)

The ISP won't provide your details to the agencies issuing the notices, 
however they take these notices seriously and give you two chances before 
terminating your account.  I don't know what other Australian ISP's 
policies are.

I would be interested to see an analysis of how much trouble an Australian 
ISP would get into for ignoring these foreign infringement notices, or 
taking a more passive role of just passing them onto the offending 
subscriber.  However, if/when the FTA is passed through parliament here in 
Australia, its definitely going to be easier for US companies to pressure 
or sue Australian ISPs - the DMCA is part of the agreement.

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