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Piracy Case Could Change Canadian Web Landscape
meatheadmike writes to tell us that a recent Canadian court case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association by isoHunt Web Technologies, Inc, could drastically change the web landscape in Canada. "The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is if a site such as isoHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of movies such as Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law? 'It's a huge can of worms," said David Fewer, acting director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa. 'I am surprised that this litigation has gone under the radar as much as it has. I do think this is the most important copyright litigation going on right now.'"
It's different because Canadians have ALREADY paid for the content, in the form of a levy on all storage media. So the media companies want to be paid twice.
This is Canada. We don't make noise. We write letters. And only if it's about something that's really really annoying.
It's also not really something we need to worry about in Canadian copyright law... all the ISOHunt people need to show is that they are not actually making the files available themselves. In Canadian copyright law, it's ok to copy/share materials as long as it's not for material gain, and you're not distributing on a large scale.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Hope you didn't illegally download that 2x4. ;)
No, they are suing becouse this is a grey area in the legal system and isohunt is tired of getting harassed my various right holders. They initiated the lawsuit so that a judge would finally decide if they run an illigal business or not.
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Sorry, no.
IsoHunt acts as a search engine and returns torrent files that can be either "legal" or "illegal".
No search engine can determine with 100% accuracy if something is legal or not, not even Google.
If I record a movie in my own garden, I can release the video on my website or even on The Pirate Bay with a license saying that only the people in my home town have the right to download the video and the rest don't.
IsoHunt will index the torrent file nevertheless and from your point of view, IsoHunt indexes an illegal torrent that should be taken down, but from my (the creator) point of view it's perfectly legal.
It's the USER'S RESPONSIBILITY to read the terms of the license, the description of the torrent file I made and download the movie if he believes he's allowed to.
So what I'm saying is that a movie or song or any binary data can be copyrighted but also can be legal to download it, it's illegal to distribute/download/upload/whatever something you don't have rights to do that and IsoHunt or any other search engine can't know that.
You can use Google nowadays for much worse things than copyright infringement, things like how to make a lockpick, how to prepare cocaine, how to steal a car, how to make a gun... but apparently a company's loss is important enough to stop something very useful to a lot of people.
It's not even worth to start commenting about cases where a company makes a movie making millions in US but doesn't feel it's worth releasing a DVD or a VHS to a small country, because they estimate they'll sell very few copies there and the profits will be smaller than the distribution and fabrication costs.
When this company retains copyright over something but yet keeps that something locked and unavailable to where I am, is that company really losing any money or suffers any losses if someone copies and gives away that stuff for free in that country? Should that company be allowed to keep copyright for 90 years on that? What was copyright supposed to be for, anyway?
+1 cause you're technically right, but seriously, if America thinks its illegal, they'll pressure someone else to think the same thing.
Only reason why tv-links went down was because of US involvement.
And how would you do that?
Let's say you have "Madonna.jpg"
How is IsoHunt supposed to know if it's
(a) a scan of a Madonna CD artwork (illegal)
(b) a picture you made with a camera of a Madonna statue
(c) a picture of your girlfriend you like to nickname "Madonna"
(d) a picture of the cover of a book that has Madonna in the name.
Or, if I make a movie of myself and friend at a party, dancing on Prince's music, and I label it "Prince - Purple rain.avi" should IsoHunt remove it because it may be the actual video of the song or should IsoHunt staff be forced to download it and count how many seconds of Purple Rain actually are (if any) so that they can determine if it's fair use (less than 30 seconds of song) or not?
If it's more than 30 seconds, do they use the Canadian laws where IsoHunt is, or MY laws, which may consider any length of song fair use?
Yeah, things like the invasion of Poland, or when someone (ahem!) burnt down the city of York. Of course, we deliver those letters personally, and staple the envelope to the forehead of the recipient. Repeatedly.
...And politely.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
>>>So this is like the Pirate Bay case, only the issues are being examined in Canada.
I don't know why you were labeled insightful", because you're flat wrong. Piratebay provides the tracker server which enables piracy. Isohunt does not. Isohunt is like google, a search engine, which means technically they are doing absolutely nothing wrong.
The fact that google links to all websites, where isohunt only links to torrent sites, is the basis of this case and has implications for ALL search engines, as it may require them to stop linking to torrent sites too.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The Pirate Bay (TPB) offers an "optional" tracker that can be used for either legal or illegal purposes.
You can however post a torrent on TPB without any of the Pirate Bay trackers, so in this case TPB will act just like IsoHunt.