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TypeS
join:2012-12-17
London, ON

TypeS to A Lurker

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to A Lurker

Re: Effort afoot in court to sue Canadians for illegal downloads

said by A Lurker:

said by TypeS:

There honestly needs to be true case of piracy with concrete evidence brought forward in Canadian courts as a test case of copyright law. But this Voltage case is not that.

I don't know, the issue is complicated. I'm using Netflix more and more. The thing I don't get is that I pay for my cable, and I have a DVD recorder hooked up to it. Recording is okay (I believe). However, if I miss setting something to record why do I suddenly become a pirate if I download an episode of something I've missed. Nobody has lost income (as I could wait for the inevitable re-run to record it), and I don't fileshare, so I'm not providing. However, I'm still technically lumped into the same category as someone who decides to cut their cable and download everything.

Well for a long time it's been settled (at least here in Canada) that downloading/recording a copy of media (music or video) is not illegal since it is akin photocopying something at library, VHS recording or cassette recording radio songs in the 1990s.

You'll never get into hot water for downloading via one way methods like HTTP, FTP, DCC, etc. The method in question is torrents. Participating in the facilitation of file sharing is illegal in Canada just like it is to be selling bootleg DVDs. Most should know by now how BitTorrent works, you're downloading and uploading at the same time.

The issue that needs to be clarified is exactly how much damage is done when someone downloads a file via a torrent. Most people are what private tracker operators call "hit and runs", they finish the download and delete the torrent. Given how paltry most upload speeds are in North America, I'd find it hard to believe any one person actually even uploaded the equivalent data amount that they downloaded, let alone all the pieces one time each that make up the file. So the question is, how much damage was really done to potential revenue of a select film/music album/video game that was downloaded via a torrent by one individual?

It'd probably only amount to dollars a person. But that would be costly legally to go after everyone, not to mention most likely impossible. So companies like Canpire are around to facilitate blackmailing those they can.

There are of course hosting companies that advertise "seeding boxes", if MPAA was serious, they'd go after these folks since they will be doing much more damage than all residential downloaders combined. You don't see private trackers going down often either, one of the first places SCENE stuff shows up before hitting public trackers and other p2p networks.

If the movie, music and game industries were hurting so much from pirating, they'd go source rather (taking down public trackers and suing Joe & Jane does nothing do dent pirating).

A Lurker
that's Ms Lurker btw
Premium Member
join:2007-10-27
Wellington N

A Lurker

Premium Member

said by TypeS:

You'll never get into hot water for downloading via one way methods like HTTP, FTP, DCC, etc. The method in question is torrents. Participating in the facilitation of file sharing is illegal in Canada just like it is to be selling bootleg DVDs. Most should know by now how BitTorrent works, you're downloading and uploading at the same time.

The big problem is identifying people. We've gone through this before, but these people have identified people in the past who definitely did not fileshare. Really stupid things, like printers even. I don't use torrents, but in the past was identified as sharing a file I'd never watched. We're talking years ago and someone from Cogeco confirmed that their notices went out by MAC addresses (may have changed since then) and the IP in the notice wasn't even in my city.

I'm too lazy to look, but I seem to remember Teksavvy couldn't even identify a great number of the IP addresses, and had to correct some that it had mis-identified. They were diligent, what about other ISPs who decide 'close enough' and shoot off your personal information.