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Canadian Copyright Notice-and-Notice System: Citing False Legal information
An anonymous reader writes Canada's new copyright
notice-and-notice system has been in place for less than a
week, but rights holders are already exploiting a loophole to send
demands for payment citing false legal information. Earlier this
week, a Canadian
ISP forwarded to Michael Geist a sample notice it received
from Rightscorp on behalf of BMG. The notice falsely warns that the
recipient could be liable for up to $150,000 per infringement when
the reality is that Canadian law caps liability for non-commercial
infringement at $5,000 for all infringements. The notice also warns
that the user's Internet service could be suspended, yet there is no
such provision under Canadian law. In a nutshell, Rightscorp and BMG
are using the notice-and-notice system to require ISPs to send
threats and misstatements of Canadian law in an effort to extract
payments based on unproven infringement allegations.
It's short for "If you see it (notice) send a letter (notice)".
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Fraud is a deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain (adjectival form fraudulent; to defraud is the verb). Fraud - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
While Canadian law does indeed cap infringement awards at $5000, there's no reason the rights holders can't sue in U.S. courts where there is no such limit. Once the ISP reveals the identity, which they are required to do under Canadian law, nothing limits what the rights holder can do with that information. Canadian courts may not comply with judgements of U.S. courts, but if the defendant has any assets in the U.S. or travels there, they could be at risk.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Criminal Code of Canada 346(1)
Every one commits extortion who, without reasonable justification or excuse and with intent to obtain anything, by threats, accusations, menaces or violence induces or attempts to induce any person, whether or not he is the person threatened, accused or menaced or to whom violence is shown, to do anything or cause anything to be done.
In Canada, once you have paid for a license of a movie, it is legal to rip it from a physical copy, or download a digital copy.
In Canada when you play money, you have to get something in return in the form of a physical item, a license, a limited license, or a service.
Home videos were going to be under the physical item category originally. The problem the MPAC had with this is that legally, in Canada, you cannot put any restrictions on what people do with an item that is labeled as physical.
The MPAC wanted home videos only to be used for private showings, thus they lobbied to have home videos be classified as a license. The problem they have now is that you own a license to watch that performance of the movie. If you have a VHS copy of The Jungle Book, it is legal for you to download the 1080p version and watch it.
The movie studios, or record companies, can get around this a bit by coming out with modified versions of the movies, or music. There is a threshold for how much change there needs to be for this to happen.
Also Herr Harper passed a law making it illegal to teach other people how to crack encryption. Though cracking the encryption for personal use is not illegal.
Basically, if you buy a movie, you own a license to view that performance, doesn't matter how you get it. Higher quality transfers, or remastering are generally still considered the same performance.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Recent copyright law renders it illegal to break any digital "lock" mechanism, regardless of whether it's for the sake of format shifting or not. There are exceptions, but you'll note that platform shifting is not one of them:
source
Platform shifting is still legal, but not of, for instance, Blu-rays or DVDs
oh, before you say it isn't fraud in this case, try reading up on Canadian law:
Section 380(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada provides the general definition for fraud in Canada:
380. (1) Every one who, by deceit, falsehood or other fraudulent means, whether or not it is a false pretence within the meaning of this Act, defrauds the public or any person, whether ascertained or not, of any property, money or valuable security or any service,
(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to a term of imprisonment not exceeding fourteen years, where the subject-matter of the offence is a testamentary instrument or the value of the subject-matter of the offence exceeds five thousand dollars; or
(b) is guilty
(i) of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years, or
(ii) of an offence punishable on summary conviction,
where the value of the subject-matter of the offence does not exceed five thousand dollars.
In addition to the penalties outlined above, the court can also issue a prohibition order under s. 380.2 (preventing a person from "seeking, obtaining or continuing any employment, or becoming or being a volunteer in any capacity, that involves having authority over the real property, money or valuable security of another person"). It can also make a restitution order under s. 380.3.
The Canadian courts have held that the offence consists of two distinct elements:
A prohibited act of deceit, falsehood or other fraudulent means. In the absence of deceit or falsehood, the courts will look objectively for a "dishonest act"; and
The deprivation must be caused by the prohibited act, and deprivation must relate to property, money, valuable security, or any service.
The Supreme Court of Canada has held that deprivation is satisfied on proof of detriment, prejudice or risk of prejudice; it is not essential that there be actual loss. Deprivation of confidential information, in the nature of a trade secret or copyrighted material that has commercial value, has also been held to fall within the scope of the offence.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You don't get names from the ISP... or addresses, or anything else.
You send your notice to the ISP and they forward it to the person using the IP at the time you allege the infringement happened.
I've already received a notice and my ISP did exactly that. Here's the full text of the message I received:
Hello,
TekSavvy has received what the Copyright Act calls a "notice of claimed infringement". It listed an IP address and time. Our systems indicate that the IP address listed in the notice was likely assigned to your account at the specified time. We are therefore legally required to forward the notice to you. The notice is reproduced, unaltered, below.
First, though, there are some things you should know:
(a) We haven't told the sender who you are. Your privacy is paramount to us. We don't track, or know, what you do. We do know what IP address we assigned to you within the last 30 days. But we don't provide personal information like that to anyone unless a court orders us to -- and we have not done so here. The notice was simply received by us, and we have forwarded it electronically on to you.
(b) We are an intermediary that is required to forward this notice to you. We do not, and cannot, verify its contents or its sender. However, a private party's notice does not mean there has been any legal ruling. Only a court can do that.
(c) It is good practice to make sure you secure your account. Your wireless router should be password-protected; the password should be changed regularly; and those who have the password should maintain good virus protection. Your MyAccount allows you to check your bandwidth usage: do so regularly, and make sure what is happening and what you think is happening line up.
(d) We retain IP address information for 30 days. If your modem has not been powered off during that period, then we may have IP address information going back to the last time you did. In addition to requiring us to forward this notice, the Copyright Act also requires us to retain the records matching the IP address and time to your account for six months. If the people who sent the notice apply to a court, they can require us to hold it for longer.
We have provided some links below. The notice, which we are required to forward unaltered, follows.
Copyright Act (see, especially, sections 41.25-26):
http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca...
TekSavvy:
http://teksavvy.com/en/why-tek...
https://myaccount.teksavvy.com...
Automated translation (you may need to copy and paste):
https://translate.google.com/?...
http://www.bing.com/translator...
--- Forwarded Notice of Infringement follows:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Notice ID: XX-XXXXXXXXX
Notice Date: 04 Jan 2015 03:52:22 GMT
TekSavvy Solutions, Inc.
Dear Sir or Madam:
Irdeto USA, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as "Irdeto") swears under penalty of perjury that Paramount Pictures Corporation ("Paramount") has authorized Irdeto to act as its non-exclusive agent for copyright infringement notification. Irdeto's search of the protocol listed below has detected infringements of Paramount's copyright interests on your IP addresses as detailed in the below report.
Irdeto has reasonable good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of in the below report is not authorized by Paramount, its agents, or the law. The information provided herein is accurate to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, this letter is an official notification to effect removal of the detected infringement listed in the below report. The below documentation specifies the exact location of the infringement.
We hereby request that you immediately remove or block access to the infringing material, as specified in the copyright laws, and insure the user refrains from using or sharing with others unauthorized Paramount's materials in the future (see, 17 U.
The ISP's are not monitoring us here in the case of this law. The copyright holders are obtaining IP addresses from Torrent sites, etc like they do in the U.S.. They then create the letters and tell the ISP to forward them to the customers at those IP addresses. The ISP cannot provide any customer detail to the copyright owner due to Canadian privacy laws unless instructed to by a court order. Even the police and RCMP are still fighting to get access to simple customer information without warrants.
That said, I'm sure the ISP's here do have some sort of traffic monitoring for their own purposes. Rogers was found to be doing that in order to slow down p2p networks and gaming.