Odex has won its appeal against PacNet, who now has to cough up the details of the downloaders who obtained anime titles off Bit Torrent. Previously, the District Judge had held that because PacNet owes a duty of confidentiality to its customers, Odex had to show an “extremely strong prima facie case” of wrongdoing before it could obtain the names of the downloaders. Justice Woo Bih Li overturned that. He was of the view that, on principle, making a disclosure pursuant to a court order could not amount to a breach of confidentiality. He also noted that the actual copyright holders of the anime titles had joined Odex as plaintiffs in this suit, and therefore the plaintiffs had a right to the names of the downloaders. [Full judgment available here, though I’m not sure for how long.] So we’re at this sad, sad state of affairs. On the one hand, the law is clearly correct. On the other, Odex has pretty much slapped a large number of anime fans in Singapore in the face. The backlash from the community when Odex started this whole affair was tremendous by Singapore standards. The Odex street protest. The blog coverage. The many SingTel and StarHub customers piling invective upon hokkien invective on their internet service providers (not linked, Google it). Now I don’t condone some of the backlash from the local anime community. Death threats to Stephen Sing? Not the right way to go. But to Odex, I would say this. Your customers want a product. If you don’t sell it, they will get it elsewhere. If you lose out, too bad. Suing people will only drive them away from you. Do you honestly think any of the people you sent letters of demand to will ever buy an Odex product again? What about the people who burned their VCDs, smashed their DVDs, in protest? Or the people who set up the Odex protest with anime-based toys? Those are the guys who didn’t care about the sub-standard quality of your dubs and bought them anyway. Those are the guys who went out and bought toys, action figures, models, and painstakingly painted them and added them to their collection. Those are the guys who saved their pocket money to buy the things they were passionate about. And those are the guys who are never spending that money on you again.