Torrenting Laws Australia
Margorie Gomoran
Downloading and sharing torrent files is not illegal. But, torrenting copyrighted material without permission is illegal in most countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and most European Union states. Uploading (seeding) copyrighted works is always illegal. If caught, you may receive a financial penalty or even a jail sentence.
EXPERT ADVICE: To conceal your file sharing activity from internet service providers (ISPs) and copyright trolls, use a no-logs torrent VPN with a safe torrent client (like qBittorrent) in order to torrent securely.
DISCLAIMER: This guide is intended to help users avoid accidentally breaking the law. While it has been thoroughly researched, seek professional legal advice to formally clarify the laws in your country.
The laws on torrenting copyrighted material vary significantly across the world. For example, in Somalia there are no copyright laws at all, whereas the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and most EU countries ban it outright.
The United States applies a three-strike rule to anyone caught torrenting copyrighted content. After three strikes, content owners can begin criminal proceedings. After this, anyone found guilty can risk up to five years in jail and a fine of up to $250,000.
Torrenting involves both uploading and downloading files, so users often expose themselves to charges of distributing copyrighted material as well as downloading it. Even so, the maximum penalties listed here are very unlikely to be brought against individual torrenters.
If you have been caught torrenting copyrighted material, you will probably find out by a letter from your Internet Service Provider (ISP). The next step varies significantly by country, but if it is your first offense you will normally just get a warning, rather than any legal response.
Copyright trolls identify users from their IP address, which is publicly visible when torrenting. Using your IP address, they can identify and contact your ISP, who will warn you and ask you to stop torrenting before giving your identity to the copyright holder.
The policy has been scrapped in most countries, though, including the US and much of the EU. The two most significant countries that still use this system are South Korea and New Zealand.
We do not endorse the use of torrenting websites, or software to download copyrighted material. There are many sites with free and legal content available through the public domain or creative commons license.
In order to share files with each other, users must connect to the BitTorrent network via dedicated software, known as a torrent client. Popular clients include qBittorrent, uTorrent, Vuze, and Deluge.
Regular downloading occurs when you click a button, and a server that hosts the file sends a copy of it to your computer over the Internet. Torrenting is slightly different than this basic process; instead of taking a file from one server and downloading the file wholesale, torrent streams break up a larger file and compress it into several packets.
Torrenting allows you to get your files from a wider host of servers, which lessens the likelihood that the files are filled with viruses (since others are already using them). It also allows you to download larger files without putting too much stress on your Internet connection.
But despite these advantages, torrenting is far from the most popular download format across the Internet. Because of this, the primary currency traded along torrenting networks is the legal or copyrighted material, like movies, music or video games. As a result, many people equate torrenting to illegal Internet activity, even if torrenting itself is not the true issue.
At the time of the report, Australians were the second-most common perpetrators for illegal downloads in the entire world. This is in spite of the fact that Australia has a relatively small population compared to other developed countries: 24.6 million as of 2017.
These lawsuits or claims rely on basic anti piracy laws currently enacted in Australia. Currently, copyright holders can reference the Copyright Amendment Bill of 2015 (passed in 2018). Roughly summarized, it allows applicants to show that ISPs enable access to online content outside Australia with the primary purpose of making it possible to infringe on copyright.
This had the effect of expanding copyright protections and allowed copyright owners to apply for specific injunctions. It made the fight against copyright infringement a lot easier on behalf of copyright owners overall. In addition, it held search engines somewhat responsible for piracy just like ISPs.
The law dictated that search engines could be held responsible if they linked to band sites, as this could theoretically be seen as improving traffic to those sites and increasing the visibility of pirating sites. As a result, search engines like Google or Bing are now being required to remove links from sites like The Pirate Bay, including their mirror sites.
According to Section 115A of the Australian Copyright Act, any applicants wishing to file a lawsuit on copyrighted grounds must apply to federal court in order to enforce the provisions of the act.
This does place a significant hamper on attempts to shut down pirating, as corporations or their legal teams must make it through the often tedious legal process to file an injunction rather than immediately shutting down the pirating sites.
The Australian pay television company Foxtel is currently working to avoid this requirement, however. They were one of the initial media champions pushing for new legislation to stop the prevalence of torrenting and strengthen laws surrounding the prosecution of offending ISPs.
The major film company Village Roadshow has also been a huge proponent of the new laws, and in pushing them to their limit. As recently as June of last year, Roadshow managed to get 76 overseas video piracy websites blocked by certain ISPs.
At this time, Australian ISPs have 15 days to disable access to various domain names that are identified in court orders. For instance, if The Pirate Bay, arguably the most popular torrenting site in the world, is named as a culprit in the breaking of copyright, then ISPs have 15 days to disable access to that website for all of their users.
Australian courts do have the ability to review claims of mirror websites under new applications, but this drags down the process even further. Orders that are enacted remain in effect for three years, but this does little when setting up a clone site is relatively easy for the managers of various torrenting platforms.
As mentioned before, targeting individual users or pirating websites themselves is largely a moot point given the huge number of individuals responsible for proliferating pirated content and the ease of creating a mirror site.
One of the landmark cases in increasing piracy prosecution came when Voltage Pictures, the producers of the movie Dallas Buyers Club, attempted to find a huge number of Australians who had downloaded the movie legally.
This also allows them to simulate being from a different geographic location, such as the US or the UK. Because the sites are only blocked for Australian users, many can still access theoretically blocked pirating sites by using this method.
As a result, many countries are banding together to stop the use of VPNs. Russia, as an example, has been signing new bills that will allow for lists of band domains to be kept by telecommunications companies.
Those companies can then contact operators for VPN or ISP services and command them to stop providing access to those websites regardless of the geographic location (or supposed geographic location) of the users. This also extends to search engines.
After that, pirates may need to rely on the Tor browser and even more in-depth methods of masking their traffic in order to access their favorite pirating sites. However, for now, getting a high-quality torrenting VPN will be enough to ease your worries about the law.
In their worst-case scenario, a pirating website may be banned from search engines or from the Internet at large eventually. But this still seems a long way off, given the legal difficulty of enacting such a measure and the ease of which pirates can make a new copy of the site. It may stop new people from finding the website but do little to stop repeat pirates from downloading new content.
All in all, the torrenting discussion in Australia reflects the global one. Most people seem to believe that torrenting media content illegally is bad, and many people assume that any torrenting must automatically be legal.
While torrenting is not entirely illegal in Australia, it is important to note that its future legality is uncertain, and the ease of accessing well-known torrenting websites like The Pirate Bay has significantly diminished over time although always possible to use them, using a good VPN.
Torrenting is the most popular form of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. It requires torrent management software to connect to the BitTorrent network. Such software can be downloaded for free for various devices.
Everyone downloading or uploading the same file is called a peer, collectively known as a swarm. Because of how BitTorrent works, a peer can download a file from several other users simultaneously or upload a file to multiple other users simultaneously.
It is relatively simple to torrent safely and keep your online activity private. Note that while a VPN for torrenting will keep your activity private and safe from prying eyes, you may still be susceptible to malware from some public torrent sites. Follow these five steps to torrent privately with a VPN.
Torrenting without a VPN means your internet service provider (ISP) can see your online activity, including the sites you visit and the content you view. In certain countries, including the US, ISPs can share this information with third parties, including intellectual property owners. A VPN will keep your online activity private from your ISP.
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