Perhaps you are have been unaware of a court case involving Australian ISP iiNet and the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). Well, to bring you up to speed a bunch of movie studios were going after this ISP called iiNet because they felt that iiNet had failed to take steps/action to stop illegal file sharing by its customers.

...but guess what?
They lost. Oh snap!

Not only did they lose, they had a nice precedent set.
But wait, Im getting ahead of myself. Lets hear what the judge had to say:


and also as a bonus:


Ok, so this means that “the mere provision of access to internet is not the means to infringement” in Australia... which makes total sense, to me at least. I mean, pretty much this says that an ISP is simply a service provider, which supplies a service to a customer. They aren't responsible for what that customer does with it.
Hooray! Logic!

Now before I get a bunch of emails about this, let me put it this way:
If this IS NOT how the decision should have went, then whats next?

Could one potentially say that its ok to sue Chevy for selling the armed bank robbers in the North Hollywood shootout a Chevrolet Celebrity?

Better yet, sue the Gov't for allowing access to the road that the criminals used to both get to and escape the bank?

How about suing a hardware store for selling someone spray paint that they used for graffiti?

Maybe go after a power company for supplying the power a marijuana grower powered his light with?

Can the water company be charged for "allowing" the water in the above marijuana scenario to be used for illegal purposes?

What people choose to use a provided service for is not the responsibility of the service provider -
it is the responsibility of the end user as an individual to abide by the law! </strong emotional opinion>

Not all is roses with this ruling, however. This is what the losing side had to say about the situation:


Wait... whats that? A silver lining to that last statement?
Hmmm...maybe. Especially when you consider that in America, the sheer cost of lawsuits has forced the RIAA and MPAA to scale back their legal campaigns against individual citizens.
You need money to pay all those lawyers.
Of course fines of $1.9M for 24 songs doesn't come down to anything but extortion anyway but apparently that's another matter all together.

Further reading:
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/3 ... vour_iinet
http://www.iia.net.au/index.php/compone ... gment.html
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/3 ... t_decision

PS - yeah I totally ripped a bunch of that from lightning - who had comment #43 @ http://www.computerworld.com.au/article ... right_case
Why? Because I agree and couldn't have put it better myself. Thanks.