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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."
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.
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.
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?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.