Why Copyright Trolling In Canada Doesn't Pay

An anonymous reader writes "In the aftermath of the Canadian file sharing decision involving Voltage Pictures that includes an order to disclose thousands of subscriber names, the big question is what comes next. Michael Geist examines the law and economics behind file sharing litigation in Canada and concludes that copyright trolling doesn't pay as the economics of suing thousands of Canadians for downloading a movie for personal purposes is likely to lead to hundreds of thousands in losses for rights holders."

Comments

Sounds like a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they should change the law. When someone infringes on your rights, shouldn't you have recourse to sue them for damages?

Re:Sounds like a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you do. And when those damages amount to $20, and your legal costs amount to a few thousand, it's just not profitable as a business model, which is what it is used as in the states.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[MightyMartian]

The law doesn't prevent that. It caps the potential damages. The whole point was to avoid the situation as it has evolved in the US.

The real solution here is for rights holders to get off their fucking asses and start giving consumers what they want.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[rudy_wayne]

Sure you do. And when those damages amount to $20, and your legal costs amount to a few thousand, it's just not profitable as a business model, which is what it is used as in the states.

Someone did a study a while back and found that the amount of money the RIAA/MPAA has spent on legal costs far exceeds the amount of money they have received in settlements. Something that everyone (excecpt the RIAA/MPAA Mafia) already knew.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[Bacon Bits]

It's also important to recognize that it's only profitable in the US because here, copyright laws haven't been updated to account for widespread personal copyright infringement. They were written with the intent of shutting down direct piracy for profit: copying a movie to thousands of tapes and reselling them for profit. That's why the penalty is so severe. Since the law doesn't qualify piracy, however, everything qualifies for this penalty. That's why jumping on a torrent for a movie can get you a fine for $250,000 and five years in prison, but walking out of Target with half a dozen games, CDs, or movies only gets you (in my state) up to a $500 fine and 3 months in jail.

The punishment here so grossly exceeds the severity of the crime, it's actually laughable.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[TheCarp]

Someone did a study a while back and found that the amount of money the RIAA/MPAA has spent on legal costs far exceeds the amount of money they have received in settlements. Something that everyone (excecpt the RIAA/MPAA Mafia) already knew.

Then someone didn't look at the right numbers, because those are the wrong ones to think about.

The RIAA is not its members. Its members publish music. The RIAA is an industry association which they contract to represent them and fight for them. The RIAA is, in some ways, little more than a merger of a law firm and a PAC. They do not sell music... they sell the idea that their services are good for the industry and their members.

I garauntee you that somewhere in the occasional statements that the RIAA makes to its members about how effective it is, they quote the total damages awarded to them as evidence of their effectiveness. High damage totals mean more to them then whether or not the settlement pays out in the end.

Those settlements are not what keeps the RIAA going, they don't have to be profitable any more than a department store's "loss prevention" (security) department needs to be profitable. All they really need to do, is convince their members that they are worth keeping around.

So it doesn't really need to be cost effective so much as more cost effective than an individual label doing all their own investigation and lawsuits.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[Jason Levine]

Not only that, but suing for $20 isn't going to be a threat to someone. Saying "if you don't settle with us for $3,000 and signing a one-sided statement saying you are a dirty, stinking pirate then we'll sue you for $10,000,000" is a threat that would be unsettling for most people. In the case of the former, you could fight it and the music companies would need to pay for thousands of lawsuits. In the case of the latter, people get scared (rightfully so since fighting a multi-million dollar lawsuit is scary business) and wind up settling. This means that the music industry doesn't need to pay massive legal fees and can make an example out of anyone foolish enough to take them on.

If personal copyright infringement (as opposed to pressing and selling DVDs) was limited to some reasonable multiple of the actual market cost of the item, copyright law could be used as intended (to fight said DVD press operations) and not to bankrupt home users based solely on an IP address in a list.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably know. It's not about money (they've been getting record profits), it's about control.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the whole point ... damages are negligible. They shouldn't be able to sue for thousands because you skipped paying them 25 cents in royalties. The law in Canada is based on fairness (doesn't always work out that way, but it's based on that).

Re:Sounds like a problem

[sconeu]

Someone did a study a while back and found that the amount of money the RIAA/MPAA has spent on legal costs far exceeds the amount of money they have received in settlements.

Well, that's certainly business as usual for the members of the MPAA. After all, no Hollywood movie has EVER turned a profit.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada just changed the law. There is a massive distinction between copyright infringement for commercial and non-commercial purposes. In Canada, the penalties are still massive if you're profiting off of someone's copyright.

Copyright infringement for non-commercial purposes have a low fixed cap.

Mind you, you would have known this if you actually followed the updating of the Canadian copyright law.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[brit74]

You have to admit that he's got a point: some pirates are pirates because pirating is cheaper than paying. I don't see why that fact is "off limits" in the discussion.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[gbjbaanb]

I think most people pirate because its easier to click a torrent and down comes the movie, and 10 minutes later you're watching it.

why else is Netflix so popular?

Of course there's always someone who does it because its free, and many more who say they'd pay a small amount but wouldn't when push comes to shove. But the majority would pay a reasonable amount to download, especially if there was cheaper options for, say, older movies so the latest blockbuster could subsidize them.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[aztracker1]

I pay for cable, but pirate pretty much everything I watch, because it's actually easier than using the DVR, and I can watch without commercials... I also happen to pay to go to the movies at *least* once a month.. this past month, I've seen the Lego Movie, RoboCop, Wolves of Wallstreet and Monuments Men. I like the media and am willing to pay for it.

I've also bought a number of DVDs over the years. I actually favor DVD, because of the less or more easily bypassed restrictions compared to bluray, and my HTPC now runs Ubuntu/XBMC, and I don't like switching to the dedicated BR player much. When I download something, it's generally something I feel I am already paying for (Cable subscription, amazon prime, netflix, etc), or honestly am unsure if I'll actually like, or I'm just being cheap.

All of that said, I pay roughly $200 a month or more on the media I enjoy... IMHO that's enough.I really hope that piracy, and the likes of Netflix get the media companies more in line with what their customers actually desire... Convenience, availability, and reasonable pricing.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[carbonUnit42]

Available for purchase is one of the reasons I used to use software like Limewire, or, in actuality, not available in my country. Living in Canada, iTunes US and iTunes Canada had different collections of music available for purchase. I could find a song on iTunes US, but not available on iTunes Canada, and because I do live in Canada, I could not easily order it off of iTunes US. If the right's holder decides to maintain the rights to a song, and not allow me to purchase it legally in my own country, then why should you be allowed to sue for copyright infringement, considering you're not making it available for me to purchase legally? I would like to see copyright reform in the sense of by maintaining the copyright in say, a country like Canada, but you're not willing to release the copyrighted material for whatever reason, then say, after a period of 5 years, you must sell or give up the copyright. It never made much sense to me for a rights holder to not allow a consumer to legitimately purchase a song, and then bitch and complain when the frustrated consumer finds other means to acquire the same song that you refused to make available for purchase.

Re:Sounds like a problem

[CCarrot]

I could find a song on iTunes US, but not available on iTunes Canada, and because I do live in Canada, I could not easily order it off of iTunes US. If the right's holder decides to maintain the rights to a song, and not allow me to purchase it legally in my own country, then why should you be allowed to sue for copyright infringement, considering you're not making it available for me to purchase legally?

Interesting thought.

I wonder how exactly they would assess 'damages' if the material in question was never available for purchase in the first place?

Re:Sounds like a problem

[Hamsterdan]

Don't worry, Harper is working hard to fix that

Copyright C+Ds aren't "trolling"

[GigsVT]

A studio enforcing their copyright against personal-use downloads might be a somewhat crappy and ill-advised practice, but it's not "trolling". To me if you were going to call something "copyright trolling" it would be more like using copyright letters to silence people, aka SLAPP, not using copyright the way it was intended, to prevent people other than the owner from making copies of the entire media as a substitute to buying it from the media holder.

Re:Copyright C+Ds aren't "trolling"

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, copyright trolling is a process more akin to the original meaning of trolling (ie: like they do in fishing, rather than the modern "internet" meaning of "being an asshole"), where they send out several thousand letters to people demanding that they pay a settlement for downloading copyrighted materials, usually at a cost drastically inflated over the actual "damages" incurred, and threaten much more expensive legal action should the recipient fail to pay up in a timely manner.

The problem is, many of these letters are sent to people who haven't actually violated that copyright, and to further muddy the waters, in Canada, all writable media (tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc...) has a levy added to it because the government assumes the only reason you'd ever buy a burnable CD/DVD is to pirate music, so you've already paid for it, and the money has already been sent off to the Canadian version of the RIAA. Hell, I've paid for it, and not even downloaded the music I technically "bought" alongside the stack of burnable DVDs I needed for backups at work.

don't canadians pay 'blank media tax' ?

[TheGratefulNet]

wasn't this to compensate media companies for data copying?

why pay a blank media tax and also restrict what they do online, re: copying?

look, if you start out assuming I'm guilty and force a penalty fee on me, I see no reason to not make the best of it and copy as much as I can, just to make USE of the money you forced out of me.

canada: you used to be cool. what happened?

Re:don't canadians pay 'blank media tax' ?

[RobinH]

The media surcharge/tarriff/whatever was only applicable to music, not movies/videos.

Re:don't canadians pay 'blank media tax' ?

[CCarrot]

canada: you used to be cool. what happened?

Have you been up here lately??

-47 Celsius with the wind chill this morning...and we're getting damn tired of it already!

Re:Better encourage rather than confront

[CastrTroy]

Personally I find I don't have much of need to pirate content now that I have Netflix. Sure there's some movies that aren't available, but I'm not the kind of person that just "has to" watch a specific movie. If a movie isn't available for agreeable terms, then I just simply won't watch it. If there's a movie that I really want to see and it isn't avaialble on Netflix, I can go to the theatre, rent it from iTunes/Play/Cable Company/etc, or even buy the DVD.

Re:Better encourage rather than confront

[Jason Levine]

And yet the content companies act as though Netflix is Public Enemy #2 (right after pirates). They seem to think that putting their content on Netflix will kill their ability to make tons of money off of the content by selling it to customers multiple times. This might be true to an extent, but the more content they make available via Netflix (and other, similar services), the less incentive people have to pirate. Yes, there will always be people who pirate. You could offer movies in a DRM-Free format for $1 each and some people would insist on pirating it instead. My advice to the content companies would be to forget about those people. They aren't potential customers. However, the guy who wants to watch Game of Thrones online, is willing to pay money for it, but finds that piracy is the easier (or only) option is a potential customer that you lose by not making your content readily available.

As someone directly involved...

[Kris Warkentin]

Apparently I'm actually one of the IP addresses named in the original suit. Funny thing is, I don't know, nor have I downloaded any of Voltage's list of crappy films. They actually have 'The Hurt Locker' (which I haven't seen) in their list but the rest are pretty much B movies. What's even more funny is that the time during which I was alleged to have downloaded some of their stuff was the same time I was in Europe on a two week vacation. There were people looking in on our house and we also have neighbors and such who use our wifi so certainly others might have downloaded movies but not me.

A fun fact about Canadian jurisprudence is that typically the loser pays court costs so if they DO try to take me to court, I think I might exhaust ever single possible legal argument, drag the whole thing out as long as I can before dropping that bombshell. I'm pretty sure that being on the other side of the Atlantic in the middle of the Adriatic on a cruise ship with no internet access proves that I didn't download anything... If I can cost Voltage a fortune in legal fees then it will be a good day.

Re:As someone directly involved...

[bluefoxlucid]

I usually just tell the MPAA I have a cousin who works at Monsanto. Considering they show up at farmers' houses with guns to talk about how it would be in your ... ahem ... best interest to grow their new line of soy, it's best to stay away.

Re:Better encourage rather than confront

[dryeo]

Canadian Netflix is pretty crappy compared to the American version and we don't have much else. It's not like the content companies want to sell their products here, at least in an easy to purchase downloadable format