iiNet attacks AFACT solicitor over investigation techniques

The solicitor for the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft has been questioned in the Federal Court by iiNet’s counsel regarding the methods the organisation’s investigators used to identify alleged copyright violations.

Gilbert & Tobin’s Michael Williams took the stand for a second time in the court, and defended the techniques used to count the number of alleged copyright infringements committed by iiNet users.

The case is now focusing on 20 iiNet customer accounts, after the AFACT dropped a claim iiNet had committed “primary” copyright infringement, as it was discovered the company had not hosted copyrighted material on its servers.

iiNet’s counsel questioned Williams about a certain account holder known as “RC10”, and submitted to him that AFACT had artificially increased the number of alleged breaches on the account.

This method was mentioned last week in court, after iiNet submitted that the number of violations alleged by AFACT was inaccurate. AFACT stated every time a computer requested a piece of a file from another user using BitTorrent technology it was an infringement, but iiNet said that was technically inaccurate.

AFACT said last week it had recorded thousands of alleged copyright violations, but due to the nature of the counting process, iiNet argued it was more likely to be “in the hundreds”.

iiNet’s counsel put it to Williams that what appeared to AFACT as a “series of sessions appeared to the user to be one single session”.

The counsel also referred to a method used by AFACT to identify copyright infringements known as a “reverse Domain Name Server (DNS) lookup”, saying it was often out-dated.

Williams agreed to this, saying it was not “100% reliable… The only way to ensure a user IP address is to go to non-public records which are records held by the ISP”.

The case has been adjourned until 2 November, when iiNet managing director Michael Malone is expected to take the stand.