Via copyright lawyer Howard Knopf
Hurt Locker Lawsuits About to Detonate in Canada?
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excesscopyright.blogspot ··· ate.htmlHurt Locker Lawsuits About to Detonate in Canada?
Michael Geist reports that the Hurt Locker litigation campaign is being imported into Canada.
An order to disclose the identities behind a list of IP addresses furnished by Volate Pictures LCC has been obtained.
It appears that the three ISPs involved, namely Bell Canada, Cogeco Câble inc. et Vidéotron s.e.n.c., did nothing to protest look out for their customers' privacy rights. They did not even appear on the motion.
Indeed, in the original BMG litigation, in which I was involved, Bell and Rogers did virtually nothing to protect their customers. They sent in prominent counsel to watch the proceedings, and to look out for the ISPs' interests. Vidéotron was actually on the side of the record companies. It was probably no coincidence that, even then, these companies had substantial IP ownership interests.
The ISP fight was led - and very capabaly so - by counsel for Shaw and Telus. CIPPIC, the intervener, for whom I acted as lead counsel, along with Alex Cameron who handled the privacy aspect, fought very hard to ensure that there was an adequate copyright basis and sufficient privacy guarantees in place. This would have required the record companies to provide sufficient, reliable non-hearsay evidence, They were apparently unable or unwilling to do so and the litigation faded away.
There are both substantive and procedural arguments that could have and perhaps should have been made in the current case by the ISPs. As the American courts are beginning to realize, mass law suits - especially when bittorent and other more complex technologies than old fashioned Napster era file sharing technologies are involved - present some very complicated issues and should not be allowed to proceed en masse without adequate scrutiny. Indeed, when they are fought, they tend to stall and collapse. We have seen this not only in the USA but in England.
Hopefully, someone will be keeping an eye out for the potential defendants in Canada this time around to ensure that their privacy rights are protected and that the Copyright Act is correctly applied.Seems the ISP's in question have no problem handing over peoples info as long as they get paid to do it.
Cogeco (AKA: The company that said All our customer are thieves)
Bell (AKA: The company that hate their customers more than we hate them)
And of course the worse of them all, Videotron (AKA: The company that said suing our customers is a good way to monetize)