Voltage Pictures, the copyright owner of Dallas Buyers Club, is seeking payment from more than 4,000 Australians who illegally seeded (uploaded for others to download) the movie on the popular peer-to-peer file sharing network, BitTorrent.
In April, internet providers including iiNet lost a Federal Court case to keep secret the names of internet users who seeded the film - in order to prevent this form of 'speculative invoicing'.
Justice Nye Perram ruled that a discovery order lodged should be granted, but any letter to be sent to those users will need to be signed off by the judge, with the draft submitted to the Federal Court of Australia.
The draft letter has since been submitted to the court, and has been published on Mashable Australia.
Questions in the draft script include:
- What is your annual income?
- Did you download DBC on the BitTorrent network? If so, when? If not, how did get it on your computer to make it available to the BitTorrent Network?
- When did you download it or put it onto your computer?
- How long have you made DBC available on the BitTorrent network?
- How many titles do you have available now and in the past on the BitTorrent network?
