Canada Court: Movie Studios Must Pay to Chase Illegal Downloaders

A recent court ruling brought bad news to movie companies and other content creators looking to sue individuals who download their films illegally online using torrents or any other means. At least in Canada. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled last week that if movie producers want internet service providers to find and hand over the personal information of users accused of copyright violations, they now must pay the ISPs a fee to do so, The Financial Post reported. The ruling came in a case involving an American film company, Voltage Pictures LLC, which is the producer behind such Oscar winners as The Dallas Buyers Club and The Hurt Locker. Voltage was planning a “reverse class action lawsuit” against 55,000 internet users whom they suspect of downloading Voltage movies for free online. Voltage, like many film companies, uses tracking software to pinpoint the IP addresses of users who share its movies via BitTorrent. Under Canadian laws, a copyright holder can demand that an ISP send a warning notice to the owner of an IP address, and the ISP must pay to make that happen. But if the company wants an ISP to turn over information about the IP address owner, that’s when the movie company must now pony up, the Canadian high court ruled on Friday. Rogers Communications, Canada’s largest telecom company and internet provider, had refused to cover the cost of digging up that information and handing it over to Voltage, according to the tech news site TechAeris. So Voltage sued to make the ISP pay, and the Canadian court sided with Rogers. Voltage was seeking personal info on just one alleged copyright violator, before moving on to sue 54,999 more. Rogers said that the cost per person is about $50—approximately $40 in United States currency—to find and transmit personal information. The company could have been looking at costs of well over $2 million to fully comply with Voltage’s demands. Those costs will now need to be paid by Voltage if it chooses to go ahead with its mass lawsuit. “This is an important win for our customers and millions of internet subscribers facing open season on their personal information,” said Rogers’ senior vice-president of regulatory affairs, David Watt, following the court decision. A lower court ruled two years ago that Rogers could force the movie company to pay the fee, but that ruling was reversed when Voltage appealed—sending the case to Canada’s Supreme Court, according to CTV News. Rogers now uses an automated system to send out the required notices to alleged copyright infringers—which it does about 200,000 times every month. But the process of obtaining further personal information about its customers and handing it over to a movie studio is more cumbersome and costs more money, Rogers said, and the court agreed. “It’s definitely a setback for this kind of mass litigation in Canada, and a much-needed one,”  copyright attorney Howard Knopf said, quoted by TechAeris. Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson / Wikimedia Commons