Rise of the Otaku Legion?
August 27th, 2007I just chanced upon a most interesting piece of news today.
SINGAPORE : Anime distributor Odex had “no right of civil action” against illegal downloaders.
This is because it was just a sub-licensee and not the copyright owner or exclusive licensee for most of the anime titles sold here.
[…]
District Judge Earnest Lau also noted that Odex was also in no position to initiate criminal prosecution.
On August 23, the judge ordered the company to pay legal costs of more than $7,000.
- via Channelnewsasia.com
Only one word describes this verdict: PWNED!
It’ll be interesting to see how the Singaporean anime community would react to the news statement. For one thing, I must applaud PacNet for holding their ground and uphold their loyalty to customers by resisting the demand to surrender their clients’ IP addresses. Somehow I think PacNet’s stocks will rise as customers of SingNet and StarHub [even those who don’t download, but for the sake of privacy] will begin to change their ISP subscriptions, haha.
This is big news. Considering that the court ruled that Odex had no right to initiate any prosecution, it’s a big boot into Stephen Sing’s face. Sure, they might come to a workaround for it, but it proves that Odex really wants to be kiasu about their business and shift the blame to the downloaders. I wonder if the death threats would eventually materialize.
The sun is rising, and the Malaysians are just watching. You can always come over and download through us, guys! :D
UPDATE: I’m not Singaporean so I’m naturally late on Singapore news. Anyway, I crawled the web a little bit and found another interesting read here. The points listed there should clear out a lot of the confusion and gray areas that have been clouding our view of the whole fiasco.
August 27th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Interestingly, a number of PacNet staffers (before I left last year) are anime lovers/and or gamers like Maple and such. That would answer some questions about why they didn’t release the info.
Also, PacNet is very anal when it comes to their customers. Everything has to be documented, whether it’s a change of account name to your CC being renewed etc etc. Being hit by a civil suit is something they cannot and will not allow to happen to them, which could be a reason why they protected their customers like this.
PacNet’s main focus has always been their customers, especially those on the consumer side. Not too surprised, actually. :)
August 27th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
well score one victory for the little guys like us. Very rare.
August 28th, 2007 at 5:10 am
of which i say, the law which Odex tried to use just fuck them over big time.