Odex's actions against file-sharing took place between early 2007 and January 2008 when Odex, a Singaporean company that licenses and releases anime for local and regional consumption, tracked IP addresses believed to be downloading anime, identified the Internet users associated with the IP addresses and threatened legal action against them. Odex alleged that these users infringed on its copyrights by downloading its licensed anime via the BitTorrent network. Between May and August 2007, two of three subpoenas on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to reveal the personal identities of subscribers were ruled in Odex's favour. This led to pre-litigation letters being issued from the company to numerous downloaders, the youngest being nine years old.[1] More than a third settled out of court for at least S$3,000 (US$2,000) per person.Anyway, that was about a year ago. And since then, the incident hasn't been of much relevance except for being used as case studies for law classes.
On 23 August 2007, Odex lost its suit against Internet Service Provider Pacific Internet (now known as Pacnet) to reveal the identities of 1,000 subscribers. District Judge Earnest Lau ruled that Odex's evidence failed to meet a number of requirements for the release of such information, especially as the company was the exclusive licensee for only one anime title.
That was till this thread popped up in Hardware Zone recently (kudos to SW).
Basically, there's this guy who claims that he received a letter from a law firm stating that their client, a certain anime company has obtained evidence of him downloading infringing copies of video titles. There were actually scanned copies of the letters on the thread but has been since removed.There's actually something that peeves me off about thecase. Apparently, the only possible way to obtain the downloader's information such as address would be through the downloader's ISP (Internet Service Provider). That means the anime company got the info from the downloader's ISP. This goes to show how much our ISPs value our privacy.
Internet Service Providers have access to so much sensitive info; chat logs, account usernames/passwords, web logs and so on. And they are the ones living off our subscription fees. I think it's fair that we demand that they care of our privacy.
Terrible times.
2 comments:
Unfortunately, most of these dealings have been made behind the scenes, and it takes some willpower to demand explanation as to who, what and when those letters came about. So much for "transparency," I guess.
I think it's time we should explain to the government why this kind of litigation is bad for the consumers in the end.
I think as consumers, what we can do would be to support ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that protect consumers' privacy.
However, in Singapore there's only so many ISPs to go around. So... Hai...
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