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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.
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.
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.