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Hurt Locker Studio Begins Requesting Canadian ISP's Subscriber Info
New submitter Nerdolicious writes "Ars Technica reports that Voltage Pictures, the studio behind the infamous Hurt Locker debacle, has requested subscriber information for thousands of TekSavvy customers in relation to alleged copyright infringements. In their official blog, TekSavvy clarifies the situation and provides further reassurance that they will not release any private customer information without a court order. They have also posted the legal documents containing both the official notice and list of films that are the subjects of the alleged infringements. However, several questions remain to be answered: will Canadian courts be amicable to these tactics after changes to copyright law were made specifically to prevent the predatory legal entanglement of Canadian citizens? Will the studio actually attempt to pursue the situation beyond the proliferation of threatening extortion letters? How would the already-clogged courts react to what amounts to denial-of-service attack on the judicial system?"
When Canada was reforming it's copyright laws it got a specific commitment from the movie industry that they were not interested in mass john-doe lawsuits against consumers. The copyright law was reformed to reflect that. Maximum penalty for _all_ infringements is as much as $5K or as little as $100 and judges are instructed by the law to keep the penalty proportionate to the damages and to consider the hardship of the penalty against the defendant.
Now here we are, the movie studio have proven themselves to be bald-faced liars and are going after consumers in mass john-doe lawsuits.
My hope is that Canadians don't allow themselves to be bullied by these copyright trolls and each and every one of them takes the matter to court. Further, my hope, wish, and desire is that the judges that see these cases see the movie industry for the liars that they are and punish them by awarding the minimum $100 fines.