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What Happens When Telecom Companies Search Your Home For Piracy (vice.com)
ted_pikul writes:
Adam Lackman ran TVAddons, a site hosting unofficial addons for Kodi media center. Last year, a legal team representing some of Canada's most powerful telecom and media companies raided his home with a court order -- they searched his apartment, copying hard drives and devices, took his laptop, and shut down his website and Twitter account [which had 100,000 followers]. Now, he's being sued for piracy and sinking deep into debt as he fights to make it to trial.
From Motherboard: Lackman did not have to let anybody into his home that morning. But it presented a legal catch-22: if he hadn't, he would be in breach of a court order and could have been subjected to fines or imprisonment. "In high school you learn that if someone doesn't have a warrant, you don't let them into your house," Lackman told me. "I didn't know there was this whole other law where big companies can spend money [on lawyers] and do whatever they want".... Shortly after the search, a federal judge ruled the search unlawful in a procedural hearing. The questioning was an "interrogation," the judge said, without the safeguards normally afforded to defendants, and presenting Lackman with a list of names to snitch on was "egregious." The plaintiffs also did not make a strong enough case that TVAddons was solely intended to enable piracy, the judge decided... The plaintiffs appealed this decision, and in February a panel of three judges -- this time in the federal court of appeals -- overturned the previous decision in its entirety. The search was lawful and conducted within legal parameters, the judges agreed. The list of names was only presented to Lackman to "expedite the questioning process," and "despite a few objectionable questions" the nine-hour question period was not an interrogation, the panel ruled....
Everything that's happened to him so far has occured before a trial where he can argue the facts of how TVAddons operated, and yet the judge who approved the search order and the judge who upheld it on appeal have already effectively ruled that his website was designed to facilitate piracy....
Lackman has already been ordered to pay $55,000 for the legal fees of the companies suing him, according to the article, and he's "already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to his own legal team...
"[I]n the new Canadian anti-piracy regime led by powerful companies, just being accused of enabling piracy can come with immense personal consequences even before your day in court."
From Motherboard: Lackman did not have to let anybody into his home that morning. But it presented a legal catch-22: if he hadn't, he would be in breach of a court order and could have been subjected to fines or imprisonment. "In high school you learn that if someone doesn't have a warrant, you don't let them into your house," Lackman told me. "I didn't know there was this whole other law where big companies can spend money [on lawyers] and do whatever they want".... Shortly after the search, a federal judge ruled the search unlawful in a procedural hearing. The questioning was an "interrogation," the judge said, without the safeguards normally afforded to defendants, and presenting Lackman with a list of names to snitch on was "egregious." The plaintiffs also did not make a strong enough case that TVAddons was solely intended to enable piracy, the judge decided... The plaintiffs appealed this decision, and in February a panel of three judges -- this time in the federal court of appeals -- overturned the previous decision in its entirety. The search was lawful and conducted within legal parameters, the judges agreed. The list of names was only presented to Lackman to "expedite the questioning process," and "despite a few objectionable questions" the nine-hour question period was not an interrogation, the panel ruled....
Everything that's happened to him so far has occured before a trial where he can argue the facts of how TVAddons operated, and yet the judge who approved the search order and the judge who upheld it on appeal have already effectively ruled that his website was designed to facilitate piracy....
Lackman has already been ordered to pay $55,000 for the legal fees of the companies suing him, according to the article, and he's "already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to his own legal team...
"[I]n the new Canadian anti-piracy regime led by powerful companies, just being accused of enabling piracy can come with immense personal consequences even before your day in court."
Talk to a lawyer first!
This country sucks more and more every day.
This is the shit you people vote for when you vote for party regulars.
Don't complain, vote them out! Otherwise you sound stupid
Should have just shown them the receipt from some CD-R's with the media levy paid, and told them to fuck off.
While this might have been his home, it was also his place of business. His site clearly is intended to aid piracy (it clearly states "don't get in trouble for streaming, get a VPN" which would not be necc for a legit operation). If he is going to fight the law, he should be aware of the likely outcome. Not saying that piracy is immoral (not walking into that trap;) but it is clearly illegal and if your business is to buck the law, at the minimum you should have a lawyer on tap.
I'm dealing right now with a Canadian company which sells battery chargers under the Optimate / Tecmate brand. These chargers are real junk, made in China, and the failure rate is extremely high. Yet the chargers are expensive.
The worst is the warranty process. The company insists you send them a video to prove the charger is not working before they will authorize a return of the charger. Then you have to pay out of your own pocket to ship the charger to them, where they will take their time diagnosing it and ( so they claim ) repairing it, after which they will ship the charger back to you. What an absurd pain in the ass process. The company essentially makes it as difficult and time consuming as possible for the customer to end up with a working product. They are going to wish they had not done this shit to me !
What this company doesn't realize is that I am going to spend a few hours a week for the next couple of years posting online and making sure they
get the reputation they deserve. By the time I am done with them, no one with any sense will buy their products. These people have taken advantage of the fact that they are not subject to US consumer protection laws, but they are going to wish they had never dealt with me, because thanks to the
web I can spread info about their poor behavior far and wide. Payback is a BITCH.
...When a Canadian is accused of "aiding piracy" as this fellow was, is to go on a killing spree at those corporate HQs/boardrooms because your entire life is well and truly fucked no matter what.
Got it.
Should SWAT some media company executives, see how they like it.
Hire a group of really smart lawyers
- to convince a lower court to grant an "Anton Piller" order to allow one party to a suit to search the premises and seize evidence from the other party without prior warning.
- to go over a credible judgement by the lower court and make it sound like something a superior court will see as bad. That requires a lot of legal research, and also a very good PR plan to chose the arguments that will appeal to a superior court.
- to find a way to levy "costs against" before the case is even heard, effectively keeping the defendant from being able to afford high-priced help, and
To do so before the case is actually heard.
The legal team here is quite magical. I suspect they're also rather expensive.
--dave
See Bell Canada v. Lackman, 2018 FCA 42 (CanLII), , as retrieved on 2018-10-27
davecb@spamcop.net
This has been going on for 10-15 years now. DMCA and such. This is standard fare.
We're all just secretly hoping it won't happen to us. But if they want to get you, they will.
They just need to make something up and take all your shit and fuck up your life big time.
See this guy for details. And wether he's done something wrong or not doesn't matter.
His life right now is fucked up bit time. True thing.
To me the solution is obvious:
Have a backup plan. Like a *real* backup plan.
Something like this:
- Mirroring of your critical data to a remote unknown location.
- Fallback computers hidden away.
- All critical documents copied and stored in an unknown location.
- Emergency cash.
- Crypto key USB sticks hidden away.
- Tried and tested disaster recovery scripts and procedures.
- Fallback spoof Google/Apple/Whatnot accounts that also have access to your main stuff - to salvage what you can when they've already come for you.
- Know where to go when they are after you. Where and how would you hide out / away?
Hardcore prepper style stuff (this is higher lever "society collapses" fallback):
- Functioning pocket water filter.
- Working digital radio with means to cheaply transfer digital data via SSB or something (PSK 31 handled with a Rasberry Pi or something)
As for the scenario this guy is in - a good way to prepare for this is to ask yourself: What would be my fallbacks if *right* *now* the police came, raided me and took all my stuff? And what can I do to prevent the worst from happening out of that? We've had this sort of thing in Germany on and off for a few decades, ever since the 80ies. The famous Chaos Computer Club and its members know these scenarios. There are some been-there-done-this talks on youtube on how they dealt with stuff like this. Enlightening - also the emotional aspect. (some are German, but probably subtitled so you'll get some info).
Bottom line: Be prepared. It's that simple and makes a huuuuge difference when the brown stuff hits the fan.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Surely we must ask that question, when corporate entities can "persuade" a government to do their bidding.
1: When nothing is entering the public domain, the public has no interest in copyright. Because copyright lasts longer than their lifetimes, they cannot see anything enter the public domain, thus nobody can argue it enriches the public domain. The arguement these companies are making is that the public has no interest in copyright, thus any technology that might be used for people to stream to eachother or become their own broadcasters is contraband. You might be able to grease enough judges to make that one pass, but the technology will only get more subversive.
2: A 10TB HDD can store enough media to last someone 3-4 years at 3-4 movies a night. Disk capacity grows by an order of magnitude every decade. In 1 Decade, 100TB Disks will be available. In 2 Decades, 1000TB\1EB Disks will be available. Wikipedia? 5.6TB. Pornhub? 330TB. Youtube? 10-20EB by most estimates. You focus on the network throughput, people just start trading gigantic versioned libraries.
Don't run questionable servers in a way that it can be traced back to your physical self.
It really sucks that the law is failing the common citizen, but at the same time, he did create this entire situation all on his lonesome. My sympathy is limited.
15 years ago Bell got pissed off at Canadians paying for US satellite TV so through their corruption of the CRTC managed to make it illegal. They used Anton Piller orders to bust people for piracy back then. The "piracy" of PAYING for satellite TV the Canadian Government disapproved of (ie: Any satellite TV that isn't Canadian).
Same results, regular hardworking Canadians who just wanted to enjoy HBO movies on the weekend ended up having to choose between massive default fines payable to Bell, or paying Bell's lawyers. Either way, goodbye house, goodbye retirement.
Fuck Copyright.
It's Bell here too. They're repeating a successful tactic, right down to the Anton Piller order.
davecb@spamcop.net
You're blaming the victim. For being terrorized by literal organized crime, who harass anybody who doesn't play ball with them literally stealing everyone's money and not working one fucking bit for it!
REMEMBER: The Content MAFIA is nothing more than organized crime that bought itself laws that say that what it does is legal.
There is no such thing as "intellectual property". Even 15 years ago, before apparently some brainwashing happened, everyone on this site would have laughed you off the site, for acting like there is. Go back and take a look!
The whole concept was just made up, so the media distribution "industry" could keep raking in money, even though their previous "business model" became pointless with the Internet. A "business model" that consists of the concept, that you could act as if a mere copy actually took work and hence must be valuable, merely because the work that created the original was valuable. Which is precisely the concept of putting $100 bills that you earned for work on the copier, and demanding to be able to pay with the copies "because I worked hard for that money, you pirates!".
They created themselves laws, even before the Internet, when the term was still "copyright", that just hand them an utterly imaginary *monopoly* over "their" bit of data, so they can apply *artificial scarcity*. Two things that are highly illegal crimes in every other case. Which makes it damn obvious how much it's merely legalized crime.
And all because they didn't want to use the same service business model that every other creator since the dawn of time uses, as that would have given the artists money, but not them, since they never added any value. And then the money stream would have dried up, which they so *desperately desperately* need too keep the MASSIVE COCAINE STREAM going.
I worked in the "industries". Music industry, TV & movie industry, games industry, etc.
At least half of all the employees I met, snorted cocaine by the masses. Hell, the boss of EMI would literally refuse to make business deals, unless the hookers were hookers and his finger-thick lines of cocaine snorted. And if you know how cocaine works, you now know exactly, where their massive paranoia and extreme over-confidence comes from, that caused this bullshit.
How can a search by the plaintiff itself be ruled legal? This should be the police's job. Or at least a third party that would have no interest into planting fake evidence during the search.
Cross Canada off the list of potential expat destinations.
Lackman did not have to let anybody into his home that morning. But it presented a legal catch-22: if he hadn't, he would be in breach of a court order and could have been subjected to fines or imprisonment.
Uh, this statement makes no sense. Of course he didn't 'have to' let anybody into his home, but the threat of legal action compelled him to.
I don't 'have to' let cops into my home, even with a search warrant... but they'll just bust down my door and arrest me for not letting them in. How is this situation different?
I'm also curious how a court order gets imposed on somebody that isn't even given a chance to argue against it in court. His first chance to contest it is when they show up to his door and threaten him? Seems really strange to me.
It's Bell here too. They're repeating a successful tactic, right down to the Anton Piller order.
Of course, the same people who have tried (and fortunately not succeeded) to censor the internet.
https://openmedia.org/en/huge-...
Bell is just a really douchey company with little redeeming value to society.
US government (and apparently Canada too) have no problem pursuing someone for pirating a $20-30 movie, but the US wonâ(TM)t even lift a finger for people getting scammed out of thousands with telephone scams via spoofed numbers. âoeWeâ(TM)ll never catch them anyway,â they say. I bet if they stopped chasing pirates and made telemarket scams a priority they might make a dent in it.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Gunless Canadian cucks. Search my house without a warrent I DARE YOU.
If they didn't charge so much for such shitty products, people might actually be willing to pay for it.
That makes them *THE* largest contributor in piracy, so let's raid their offices, steal all their shit, and put it all into the public domain where it all belongs.
And, since I just accused them of this piracy contribution, that makes them guilty without a trial.
They now owe me every penny ever earned in the last 100 years.
At 225% daily compounded interest rates until they pay in full.
just take out the lawyers after enough are done ....
They're still trying, and with the new NAFTA crafted by a reality TV star, they might succeed.
We have the 15 GB tax (only reason a household would use more then 15 GBs a month is due to legally streaming from companies that rip off the artists, so we the people, should pay a tax that in theory would help pay the artists who signed a bad contract) http://www.michaelgeist.ca/201...
Then we have the move to tax or censor HTML links, this link should cover it, but it is currently not loading properly in my old browser, http://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/XRend...
Also at the same link should be info on other shit they want in our revised copyright act.
Unluckily we have an 800LB gorilla behind a lot of this shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The search was lawful and conducted within legal parameters, the judges agreed. The list of names was only presented to Lackman to "expedite the questioning process," and "despite a few objectionable questions" the nine-hour question period was not an interrogation ...
We don't hear about Canadian courtrooms, so I'm asking if this US-style 'corporations have more rights' argument, is common?
There's a way to almost completely protect yourself from raids like this, as well as take revenge upon the companies who see piracy everywhere and use their thug tactics like this.
Don't watch.
Don't watch their TV shows. Don't watch their movies. Don't listen to their music. I'm not saying don't pirate; I'm not saying only watch via legal means. Don't watch it at all. I know -- to many the idea of simply not watching TV, or movies, or listening to music, is incomprehensible.
They only have money, and thus power, because people want to see their wares. If you don't want to see what they're pushing, they have no power over you.
How so?
First, if you run servers designed to help people steal stuff, then it sucks to be you when the law catches up with you. It does not sound like "the law" has failed this guy, but rather that he ran afoul of the law, intentionally, and simply assumed he'd never be held to account.
Second, if you're in Canada, you need to be at least a marginally-alert person and pay attention to the fact that you do not have the Constitutional rights that an American enjoys - in Canada, people go to jail or pay steep fines for saying politically-incorrect things (author Mark Steyn encountered this bit of fun).
As bad as some in America are trying to make things, with the current snowflake fad being the attemped reversal of "innocent until proved guilty", I'd still rather be in the US and under the jurisdiction of the Constitution than in Canada.
Want a good life? Dont's be a thief and also don't be a facilitator to a bunch of thieves. It's really rather cute that some people pretend copyright law does not exist, just like a small number in the USA are always pretending there is no income tax - and they manage to fool a few into believing them every year, which means every year the IRS has to prosecute some simpleton for not paying his taxes. The law, in those cases, is NOT "failing" these people, but rather it is functioning perfectly properly and going after a law breaker.
You can delay while you seek legal counsel, refuse to let the search proceed (at risk of contempt of court), and seek to vary the order, undertaking to not destroy any evidence.
Google "Anton pillar freehills".
So many leftists are voting for overbearing state and tech companies. They aren't doing so by intent, but it is what they effectively cause. They want "the good" to rule unopposed and thereby creating an unopposable part of society. As with all other leftist states, this invariably comes back to haunt us, them and anyone else in the end, when the created entities "for good" are quite unsurprisingly taken over by psychopaths and power hungry despots.
He then pays his friend for his work, which debt comes before anything due to the opposition. Then go bankrupt and get paid to live and eat at her majesty's pleasure. If he's going to be in debt no matter what he does, he needs to make sure these shitheads don't get anything. So give it to a friend.
that is all. Business Software Alliance all over again.
If you don't want to follow their rules, don't play with their toys.
When they start doing this to pornhub users people will start caring
The problem here is that Canadians don't have a actual bill of rights.
Maybe if you didn't watch so maybe American TV shows, you wouldn't think the court system in Canada works like the one in USA.
Canada appears to be an oligarchy, and in such systems you shouldn't expect to be allowed to go about your life free from tyranny.
It's not the law, it's whether the parties are prepared to obey the law, or find a way around it by force or fraud. https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/l...
davecb@spamcop.net