IIRC, it wasn't the Privacy Act (PIPEDA), because there is an exception in it that says a court order overrules any consent to disclose rules.
What it was is that (1) the judge said the file sharers did nothing wrong (he'll get overruled on appeal though, where they'll find that uploading but not downloading is illegal) and (2) the evidence tying the P2P user names to the ISP accounts was garbage (wrong affiant, not clearly tying IP addresses to users etc.).
1) There are no common law rights to copyright in Canada. See s.89 of the Copyright Act. You should (in theory) be able to determine any right under copyright by reading the Copyright Act. It doesn't exactly work this way, but it's true in general.
2) There is no "fair use" doctrine in Canada, at least not like it is in the States. In the states "fair use" is a broad, non-exhaustive principle. In Canada it's called "fair dealing" and it involves a number of specifically set out exclusions that make up fair-dealing.
3) People have to be careful interpreting Canadian copyright law based on US (or even UK) copyright law. They really are surprisingly different, at least as far as my research has gone.
4) DRM may well be illegal under something other than copyright (I'm thinking Competition Act, but I don't know). It would be an interesting research project for somebody to look into.
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IIRC, it wasn't the Privacy Act (PIPEDA), because there is an exception in it that says a court order overrules any consent to disclose rules. What it was is that (1) the judge said the file sharers did nothing wrong (he'll get overruled on appeal though, where they'll find that uploading but not downloading is illegal) and (2) the evidence tying the P2P user names to the ISP accounts was garbage (wrong affiant, not clearly tying IP addresses to users etc.).
1) There are no common law rights to copyright in Canada. See s.89 of the Copyright Act. You should (in theory) be able to determine any right under copyright by reading the Copyright Act. It doesn't exactly work this way, but it's true in general.
2) There is no "fair use" doctrine in Canada, at least not like it is in the States. In the states "fair use" is a broad, non-exhaustive principle. In Canada it's called "fair dealing" and it involves a number of specifically set out exclusions that make up fair-dealing.
3) People have to be careful interpreting Canadian copyright law based on US (or even UK) copyright law. They really are surprisingly different, at least as far as my research has gone.
4) DRM may well be illegal under something other than copyright (I'm thinking Competition Act, but I don't know). It would be an interesting research project for somebody to look into.