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Canadian Record Industry Presses ISPs in Court
An anonymous reader writes "'Internet service providers have neither an obligation nor, in some cases, the technical means to help the recording industry identify 29 alleged music pirates, a federal judge heard yesterday.' The article continues, 'Shaw Cable, the most defiant company among the pack, poked holes in CRIA's case and accused the music industry of planning an extended fishing expedition for the purpose of forcing individuals into costly settlements before cases ever get to trial. This is the same strategy used by sister organization the Recording Industry Association of America, lawyers argued.'"
Makes me almost happy to put up with Shaw's mediocre mail servers.
GO SHAW!
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Shaw lawyer Charles Scott, of Lax O'Sullivan Scott, said the cable company has a duty to protect the privacy of its customers, not to become a "private investigator" for the music industry by being forced, at its own expense, to analyze and hand over subscriber information
I can hear the next argument: "Hand all of your data over and we'll analyze it...."
Seems canada's status as the new land of the free may have been short-lived.
Well, they're obviously wrong.
Pirates don't go fishing, they go pillaging.
judge:NEXT!
Did you bother to RTFA, or even the summary?
Thought not.
ISP: "Look, it's not our job to scour our reams of data just so you can make up some dirt on our customers."
RIAA: "You're right...guess you'd better hand it over to us."
ISP: "No."
Court: "Yes."
ISP: "Fuck."
I'm on rogers, the problem is it seems they don't let you download from P2P or from their news servers. They shut your service off if you do.
Well this guarantees I'll never subscribe to Videotron when I go back to Montreal. In fact, I'm going to try to convince my parents to switch over to Bell.
This is one of the few times I'm happy to be with a small ISP. The service is crummy (I'm technically out of range) but the price is right for uncapped speed (3 Mbit) @ $40 mo. Plus I feel pretty safe from this legal battle (not that I've anything to hide that is).
So please take the crack out of you bong.
But is there not a right to privacy? If the RIAA can spy onto your shared folder is that not the same as looking into your house or mail? Are those rights not protected by the law? Lawyer Help me out
I can't pirate in the USA! Time to move north to Canad^H^H^H^Hwell, I hear Mexico is nice this time of year.
Kids these days. They don't know the difference between classic, and just plain old.
Is rogers standing up for its customers? I sure hope so... I can't get anything here but rogers highspeed cable internet access, nothing else is available!
No, this is
My ISP is actually defending my rights?
What's going on here?.
I figgured that when the lawsuits start flying north of 49, Shaw would be the first to belly up and hand over my name, based on their records so far (I had a few billing issues).
I wonder if Canadians can sue CRIA for racketeering like one or two Americans are the RIAA.
RIAA countersued Under Racketeering Laws.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
So yes, we do indeed have freedom of speech, and it is protected.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
why are they logging anyway ? whats wrong with unticking
[ ] save log to disk
or send them to dev>null
if the logs didnt exist there wouldnt be anything to argue
also the ISP has not said they will refuse, from the article..
by being forced, at its own expense, to analyze and hand over subscriber information.
are they saying that they will hand it over if the RIAA pay them for the information ? re-imburse their expenses ?
The ISP has a duty to protect the privacy of its customers, not to become a "private investigator" for the music industry by being forced, at its own expense, to analyze and hand over subscriber information.
No ... any good strategist will tell you, don't let your enemy have anything for free. Make him pay for it. These industry groups have only the legal tools that government grants them, and they've only gotten those because there was no organized resistance. Keep the pressure on: don't let them take anything from you without a hard fight. Shaw is taking the proper stance, because once a precedent is set it's that much harder to correct later.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Why would anyone put up for sharing, thousands of copyrighted songs? Its an invitation to get sued. It would be more stealthy to share 400-500 at a time. If it is meant as some sort of protest, the user should volunteer his/her info, and have his/her proverbial "day in court".
Yes! Evil rules! Good can suck it! Suck it, good!
Can you not do an IP address block on this crap? When is it EVER on-topic? How about a nice filter to catch any AC posts in the first 30 (some arbitrary number) comments on a thread on a story, and reject them?
Great way to get people modding when they have to wade through this racist bullshit.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Shaw is too busy spamming the rest of the world to care about cooperating with an investigation.
No.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
And vote for four more years for King George?
What the hell are you smoking?
will the courts uphold the previous laws passed about fair use... we pay tarrifs on media as a result of the laws that give us the right to share and copy music.. you cant charge someone a fee like that and then sure them for excercising their rights.
How is this a troll? Other people have said the same thing. Canada does not have the same laws as the US.
Why would anyone want to censor this?
Many laws have been passed since then that undermine the Charter Of Rights. Even if one was to agree with their intent, they are very broadly worded and could be used for other purposes.
See the Canadian Human Rights Act (articles 12 & 13). There was another one that supposedly dealt with child pornography. It was even worse, "child pornography" wasn't even mentioned in the bill. I'll see if I can find a link.
Scott said Shaw, because of the design of its network and its policy for storing customer data, does not have a way of "reliably" complying with such a court order.
I assume dynamic IP addresses might be an issue here - would hate to see poor senior Mrs. Johnson down the street get nabbed for being accused of dl'ing P.Diddy!
Some aim to please, I aim to tease.
The plantiffs (recording industry) would probably not be able ot show the judge that there are reasonable grounds for them to be able to anyalyze records of indivduals that are not associated with the lawsuit. If you are involved in a personal injury lawsuit, you can't subpoena the hospitals entire patient file.
Canada also has a privacy law.
Always remember:
Pillage first, then burn.
I haven't bought a new album from a retail record store in years and years. Whenever I desire a peice of plastic (which is frequent enough) I'll pick it up at a used store, earning the artist and label no money anyway. How long until second hand shops are shut down by CRIA?
Anyone who thinks Canada is freer than the States is full of crap. We are simply 1 or 2 years behind our big fat brother downstairs. We'll adopt every law they enact (file swapping) and maintain every nonsensical law they uphold (marijuana posession) until the end of time. Why? Because we don't want Dubya to drop a W-bomb on our various beaver hatcheries.
All hail America Jr., land of the slightly freer (until 1 year later).
In the mean time, keep doing what you do. Make a statement by defying the law. Protect yourself while you do it. Use PeerGuardian 2.
Glad im with Shaw, they're way better than Rogers or Telus by far.
Haha.
Maybe it's more like:
ISP: Uh..no, that's expensive.
Court: That seems reasonable.
ISP (as voice over monologue): These jackasses are stupid and have deep pockets, and this is a reasource only we can provide. *manical laughter*
[cue thunderclap]
RIAA Lawyer1 (to RIAA Lawyer2): Why is he grinning and rubbing his hands together? Oh my God, are his teeth shaved into points?!
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting anyone go out and do this, but wouldn't it be an interesting scenario to protest and demonstrate against the recording industries' treatment of the customer as a pre-supposed criminal, and show what devastating effects losing the customers altogether can wreak?
For example, wouldn't it be interesting if all owners of CD's just decided after making sure they had ripped and encoded and backed up their existing CD's under the auspices of "fair use" suddenly decided to sell their CD's... say, maybe for $1? Now, of course, the most important thing in this transaction is the seller remember to destroy existing "fair share" stock... :-)
I would think if some organized mass effort like this ever grew legs, the recording industries would maybe understand better the repercussions of their disdain and disregard for the integrity of their customers. (I, myself, have about 1300 CD's )
Just my 01
... actually invited the ISPs into court, instead of getting an Anton Pillar order - which I believe is ex parte.
Maybe that's the next step. (Maybe I'm way off on this as well - I've only studied American law) As draconian as we all think the DCMA is - at least we don't have to deal with those Anton Pillar orders - talk about plundering.
Ryan Kennedy opposes comm
Shaw's true reason is not that they CARE about their customer's privacy, but rather that their network infrastructure is so fucked-up that they are simply unable to keep logs properly...
Montreal-based Groupe Videotron Ltee. is the only service provider to say it will fully co-operate.
So, the French mode of surrender applies across the Atlantic too, n'est-ces pas?
I can't wait for the day a deaf man gets sued by the RIAA; or someone getting sued for sharing Jimi Hendrix.
Yesterday an anti-piracy "decreto di legge" (for the moment only for movies, but it will be extended) was passed (the final step before it becomes a law). It is somewhat like the new european law, but it is stricter with sharers. The ISPs are by law forced to hand over to the "Guardia di Finanza" (cops) the info on the sharers whenever a copyright owner complains (the law says that if they don't comply, they can be fined for up to 250.000 euros). The sharers will then be fined "simbolically": (1500 euros), and the information of the fined sharer will be published (!!!) on a national newspaper!! Yup, no kiddin', Italy sucks, and if you know italian you can check for your self here: http://www.beniculturali.it/download/DL_Cinema_PCM 12032004.pdf
More info can be found here: http://punto-informatico.it/p.asp?i=47374 , but unfortunately it's all in Italian (I am waiting to find an article in english to submit the story....)
Whether Shaw Cable has a messed up network or they respect the users privacy, its nice to see ISP's stand up against the music industry for a change instead of whimpering in a corner.
At least they are not going out of the way to get some poor kid sued for a million dollars!
Lord of the Binges.
Is it?
How about when you go browsing for pr0n. Any page request you make goes through your ISP. (Unless you use an anonymous proxy, but how many people do?) Your ISP probably logs every page you view. Anyone on your local hub could easily tell what nasty perverted filth you're into by using a packet sniffer. If your neighbor or your ISP came knocking on your door and handed your significant other a complete list of your online pr0n depredations, would it be an invasion of your privacy? If the snitch on your doorstep had set up a pair of binoculars across from your window and spied on you browsing pr0n you could charge his ass easily. But what about online snooping?
If you're walking down a street, does another random person have the right to walk up to you and demand you show them your ID for no apparent reason? Is browsing for beef jerky recipes and used star wars toys online the same as walking down the street?
We have a lot of privacy rights in the real world, and I'm trying to figure out how they should relate to the online world. It seems to me that our privacy online isn't what it is offline. Just because your ISP can pull up complete logs of your online habits doesn't mean they should be compelled to. Personally, I don't think they should be legally allowed to keep half of the records they do keep. Unfortunately, just the opposite seems likely to happen. All Shaw has to do to protect itself in the future is stop logging data which the CRIA could use. However, it is entirely likely that CRIA could legally compel Shaw to keep those logs. That, in my opinion, is wrong, and I hope it doesn't happen!
what would happen if the mom and pop shops just started crying "wolf". Run a more politically active "home" page that focuses on local politics with plenty of contact information (city, county, state) and good links to government reasources. Then everytime they get a threatening lawsuit, go off on their page, let their customers know their "privacy is being threatened." Make it political rather than commercial. Call up newspapers, tv stations, make an effort to know their customers well enough that they can use them to shape their business and community image. Offer up a typical p2p user for the company, a highly skilled technical professional with a fancy .com chair who uses it for hosting and obtaining iso's of open source programs, etc. Practically libel and slander the company under the protection of it being your clearly presented opinion of them. Talk about how the evil mega-corporations are trying to force them out of business so they can outsource jobs to India and provide less services for more money while they police all your activities on line, and sell the information to spammers.
If they didn't go too far off into space with the rhetoric, and ran their company so that it was reliable and responsive to its customers, I would bet it would be bulletproof. Slapped with a lawsuit just short of barratry? Get the community to demand the state's attorney general slap back. Who knows a trade association representing just such businesses might have a surprising amount of clout.
Hell, if a state attorney general just held a press conference and said that they'd think the record companies seeking to intimidate people into settling frivilous lawsuits should face a proportunate risk, and put up 10% of their gross profits against the 10% gross their asking of the average [insert state here] family, I'm sure at least a few suits would need changing.
"Haliburton is stealing your freedom for pennies on the dollar!" plays well at 5' 6' and 11'.
So how does this story affect 'My Rights Online'??
Damn slashdot editors think your rights are the same everywhere.
Because a precedent created anywhere -- but especially in Western democracies -- will be used as justification for the same legislation or rulings elsewhere.
It's a matter of record that on controversial issues, one nation's courts or legislatures will look to what is the prevailing opinion in other democracies -- witness some of the U.S. Supreme Court's various opinion on capital punishment, some of which make reference to the prevailing climate of opinion in Europe.
And it's not mere coincidence that the European Union and Australia is passing laws that look a lot like the DMCA; given world-wide trade, one nation will pressure another nation to bring its laws into conformance with the first's, or into conformance with some international treaty.
So wherever the bell tolls, whether in Canada or Germany or your own homeland, the bell tolls for you. It's in my direct interest to see that my neighbors' rights are secured in their countries, so as to provide a good example to the legislators and judges in my own country.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I'm no mp3 downloader and I frankly think that most music sucks but I'll be switching to Bell as a matter of principle.
mod as funny please. thanks.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
check dickwads history , especially this comment
and then where he stole it from
what odd behaviour, i presume its a personality flaw of some kind
This is good news for me, I am a Canadian on shaw cable. Its good to know that someones sticking up for my rights..
Are the CRIA making sure to go only after the P2P users who have uploaded?
:)
I ask since...possesing copies of music you dont own, including P2P downloading is TOTALLY LEGAL here in canada. (first link is to the govt site explaining fair use, explaining you can copy any music, even music you dont own, as long as YOU are the one making the copy)
Fair use covers the fact that I can 100% legally borrow my friends cd's and copy them. He, on the other hand, CAN NOT make a copy for me.
So I guess Canada is not totally regressing into the USA
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
However, the Internet and disks are still not considered taxable medias. Sueing peoples make no sense. What they should do, it is to trying to convince the Board to include Internet and disks in the list. And the money should go to the artists rather than to the recording industry.
Personnally, I would be willing to pay some amount for the artists, but not for the industry which seems to me always harder to justify. Dinosaurs became extincted because they were simply obsolete given the new living conditions on earth. The recording industry is simply becoming obsolete, not the artists, and I don't see any reason to perpetuate the mascarade...
Achille Talon
Hop!
I thought that Canadians paid a "broadband tax" to cover the cost of "pirating".
Has anyone else here heard of this?
How can the record companies go after someone if they are already receiving a handout from the government to cover that loss?
Am I completely wrong about this?
Wouldn't this be "double jeopardy" if you've paid your share for using broadband, but they are still sueing users?
Read, L
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
TELUS recently started to hand out notices of copyright infringment. Its mostly bittorrent ports they monitor but in the copyright notice they actually specify the name of the file and the date / time.
It specifically said it wasnt a legal notice but just a warning that this could be seen as copyright infringment.
This is the same strategy used by sister organization the Recording Industry Association of America, lawyers argued.'"
I first read this as "used by sinister organization the Recording Industry Association of America," and wondered why the lawyers were being so forthright...
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Please stand with me and write glowing letters to Shaw to show our appreciation. They stood up when they didn't have to and it is to be commended. Too many ISPs answer to the RIAA and CRIA too easily.
We often forget that they must be praised for this. I find myself all too often only writing letters out of anger when someone/some group does something I don't appreciate.
Lets show Shaw how great they are! Write a letter today!
the threshold for obtaining an anton pillar order is (supposed) to be quite high. the common law generally resists intervening without notice in the affairs of legal or natural persons. [in practice more so for legal persons - coz they have money ...]
to obtain an anton pillar order, one is supposed to demonstrate an urgent need to act to preserve evidence.
the obvious presumption being that the target entity, if given notice, would immediately act to destroy the evidence in question - and the applicant is supposed to demonstrate sufficient cause to believe that the target entity might indeed do so.
also presumed, and to be demonstrated, is that there is sufficient cause to believe that the target entity actually has material relevant to the applicant's interests. it has to be more than a suspicion - more than just fishing for something to use against the target.
different jurisdictions have different thresholds for anton pillars. there are also statutory mechanisms available in some jurisdictions that can be used in place of anton pillar's - often with broader powers and/or lower thresholds.
by bringing the isp's to court, the cria can argue they're being fair. and it's safer than going for an anton pillar.
it also achieves the same result. parties to a civil action cannot act to the detriment of the other party - they cannot readily dispose of assets that could be used to pay compensation, for example.
disclaimer: anything i write is just my opinion, however brilliant or correct ;)
I tell you what it means. Moxy Fruvous and Anne Murray are #$@E%@ pissed off!!! That's what it means!!!!
After the lawsuits were launched i just turned my file shaing option back on... i was actually beginning to buy cds again (ok, so it was because the quality of classical mp3s wasn't great but still i was buying them) now i'm just going to download everything. I was one of the few high school seniors I know that actually bought cds but now they've just alienated the few people in their target audience that were supporting them, now there's an outstanding business strategy.
The list of the offenders in this case can be found at& file =viewtopic&t=24
http://www.canfli.org/index.php?name=PNphpBB2
I have 900+ vinyl albums.
I have 200 CD's.
Therefore I have the copyrights to well over 12, 000 songs.
I only have about 2000 mp3's on my hard drive.
I still need over 10,000 mp3's just to fill my current library.
Maybe we should have a clearinghouse for languishing coyrighted material. (I used to faithfully pick up CD's to replace the best of my vinyl, never again.)
They're sticking you with something, but it's not what you claim. For example, they're sticking you with pay in advance, conning you to pay for their outdated modems, spamming their promotions, and cutting you off, but when you call in they say everything is fine (until you hang up.)
It costs them resources to keep logs and investigate them. Protecting your privacy is just a convenient PR. If it costs them nothing to investigate their logs, I'd doubt they're willing to spend money on hiring lawyers just to protect your privacy.
In this case, they'll have to spend money, so they might as well hire lawyers this one time to fight the possible trend. Videotron doesn't want to fight this because they have interests in the music industry, if you're curious.
I think they should go after all pirates of everything: Aggressively. We should be charged a per listen or view fee for everything. This would discourage all commercial media purchase; put 'em out of business. To hell with them: profiteers all! Then we could all go back to making our OWN music, playing the spoons, banging sticks, tapping our toes and singing along.
-Turnip Onion --- Neither micro nor $oft. Linux is a fine tool.
Just wonderin',I am. Plastic is plastic, bits are bits....
Montreal-based Groupe Videotron Ltee. is the only service provider to say it will fully co-operate.
As another poster said, thats logic since Videotron is owned by Quebecor Media, that owns Archambault which already have an legal online MP3 download.
My concern about that is the quasi monopol videotron has about home internet service. Fortunately for us, you can always switch to DSL with Bell's Sympatico (they just announced faster download/upload speeds, im reaching 80k upload). Bell AFAIK dont have any business in the music industry and wont offer help (at least not that easily) to the CIRA or whatever its called.
I dont know bout cables alternatives, though.
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
This is like trying to charge all Canadians for copying audio cassette tapes. The CRIA needs to go bark up another tree, or even better, adjust to technology.
I guess that really, it would hang on where the active initiative took place. With shared files, it makes sense that there is nobody actually actively "uploading." It's not like there's a central storage point where they're sending copyrighted material, nor are the actively initiating a transfer to another computer.
When you "send" files on a P2P network, you aren't out there looking for somebody to send to say saying "I'll give Jimmy Q this file," but instead it is Jimmy Q, the downloader, making an active request from your machine.
Without the request from an active downloader, you would be doing nothing wrong. And with the CD-levy, we've come close to legitimizing the downloading.
Interesting, my experience has been almost the opposite. I've used both over the years, started out with DSL but had major annoyances with the first generation PPPOE they used.
Switched to Shaw years ago, and found that performance varies wildly depending on location. My current location (Armstrong's Point in Winnipeg) is good during off-peak hours, but performance drops sharply during peak times.
At work, I'm using DSL and have found it fast and seamless. Yes, MTS revamped their mail servers and have had some growing pains, but they seem to be getting them worked out. And their spam and virus filtering is much better since the changes.
That being said, I can't say much about Shaw's spam and virus filtering 'cause I use a FirstClass server for my personal mail. But I haven't noted a lot of problems with MTS besides a couple of mail server outages right after the upgrades.
I'm going to consider what you've said, though, because I'm moving in a few months and was planning on going back to DSL (I'm looking at a highrise apartment building, and figure it will most likely only have one cable node and be slow as a result). Might have to reconsider.
Cheers!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
It is hard to believe the claims of the broadband ISPs that they can't identify which customer has a particular IP address at a particular time.
Now, they might do no logging at all, or their back-end billing systems might be crappy, but how do they apply their bandwidth caps (& extra billing) if they can't track their IP addresses?
Answer? They must keep track, but they don't want the hassle of providing the information.
Cable broadband in Canada is in trouble because of Bell and Telus' low-end DSL offerings. Because cable is fixed bandwidth, it only has the option of competing for the higher-end customers. Luckily these are often the same people who want digital cable, so bundling them allows competitive pricing. But to stay competitive, cable needs to start attacking the phone company's monopoly on landlines either by offering phone-over-cable or investing in VoIP.
Unfortunately, the optimistic slogan rarely seems to reflect reality. But that's for the best, because the proletariat still think they're free and brave.
google translate not working?
1) MJ Decrim
h on.shtml). Making small-scale possession a mere ticketable offense makes it approximately as illegal as jaywalking - i.e., not very.
l ictheightening.shtml), federal agents can arrest everyone involved, and have shown an eagerness to do so. Ontario is already providing medical marijuana to patients, something no US state can do without federal legal action.
Canada can not fully decriminalize marijuana, thanks to international treaties (http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/254/cauc
By contrast, no part of the USA has anything but draconian drug laws, thanks to federal laws. Regardless of what California might want to do with medical marijuana (http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/254/conf
2) Iraq
There are several dozen Canadian soldiers serving with the US or British forces in Iraq as part of regular force exchanges. Their presence does not change the fact that the Canadian Forces are not participating in the Iraq war, and that we engendered significant resentment from the USA for refusing to join their war.
If you're going to "correct" someone, do make an effort to be more correct than they are. Or correct at all, in your case...