RCMP Won't Go After Personal Filesharers

mlauzon writes "The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use (Google translation). Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers, such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances, instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid's users don't have to worry about getting prosecuted, at least not in Canada. 'Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,' Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview. 'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'"

Comments

I thought copyright violation was civil law.

[debest]

Why was the RCMP *ever* involved in investigating copyright violation? I always thought (at least here in Canada, where we don't yet have a "DMCA" law) that violation of copyright was a civil infraction. I also thought that the police limited their investigations to criminal infractions.

Of course, I could very well be totally wrong! :-P

Any Canadian lawyers know of the legislation that our police were acting upon when they were involved?

How was demonoid taken down?

[aussie_a]

How could the CRIA have a leg to stand on in shutting down demonoid when downloading music without permission from the copyright holder is legal in Canada?