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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.
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.