George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

There are criminal offence provisions in the Copyright Act, but the purpose of those criminal offence provisions is not to deal with the examples you have given. You talked about, for example, somebody downloading copyrighted material—file sharing is the practice most commonly instanced. That is not the kind of commercial grade breach of copyright which the offence provisions of the Copyright Act are directed to. If that conduct were ever to be the subject of judicial proceedings, they could only ever be civil proceedings—to which this legislation does not apply. No civil litigant, other than through a notice for third party inspection or subpoena issued by the court, could have access to metadata in support of a proceeding like that. Because the obligation being observed by the service providers is an obligation which will now be solely an obligation in obedience to this act, the sole purpose test would, one would expect, be met in every case. So metadata could not be accessed in civil litigation in those circumstances either.