The Author:
James Gannon is a lawyer at the firm McCarthy Tétrault. The views expressed here are his own.
Tag Archives: BitTorrent
Canadian Hosting Provider Cites Weak Copyright Law to Attract Pirate Websites
Posted by on January 4, 2012
There has been a lot of press lately in the U.S. about their proposed IP enforcement law, the Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”). As I previously noted, when creator groups were asked which websites they intended to target with SOPA’s site-blocking provisions, the groups were clear that legitimate online businesses would be unaffected by the [...]
Canadian BitTorrent Sites Dominate Rogue Website Lists in SOPA Submissions
Posted by on November 17, 2011
Yesterday, hearings began in the United States House of Representatives on H.R. 3261, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA). Witnesses from the U.S. Library of Congress, Pfizer, the MPAA, MasterCard and the AFL-CIO all voiced support for the Act, which would give judges injunction-granting powers against ISPs to block rogue piracy websites similar to the [...]
Swedish Copyright Reform Proves Ability to Deter
Posted by on June 16, 2011
Last year, I wrote about the remarkable turnaround in Sweden, from a country known as a home and host to many digital piracy websites and their users, to a country at the forefront of copyright reform and, consequently, revitalized cultural industry sales. I noted that this turnaround was likely due to a combination of copyright reforms, [...]
Criminal Convictions Upheld in Pirate Bay Trial
Posted by on November 26, 2010
The Svea Court of Appeals in Sweden has upheld the criminal charges laid against three out of the four Pirate Bay operators (with the fourth’s trial being delayed due to illness). The Globe and Mail reports: The Svea Appeals Court agreed with a lower court ruling that found Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom [...]
The full picture on Michael Geist’s “facts” about Canadian copyright
Posted by on September 27, 2010
On his blog last week, Michael Geist speculates about a trip by a Canadian music industry group to the U.S. which was designed, in his words, to “embarass [Canada] into changing its laws”. He then lists a number of “facts” that he is “guessing that the discussion did not focus on” at a number of [...]
Swedish police raid Pirate Bay’s ISP
Posted by on September 7, 2010
A co-ordinated raid of 14 European countries as part of an effort to root out illegal camcorder copies of recently-released movies has resulted in seven arrests and a raid on PRQ, the host ISP of BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. Among the seven arrests, four Swedes have been detained on suspicion of illegal filesharing. In [...]
CCER: “omg, canadian government totally not paying attention to game pirates!”
Posted by on May 10, 2010
The Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights (CCER) are a group of modchip manufacturers that earn a living selling little chips that allow video gamers to play pirated games on their consoles. I’ve written before about their attempts to inundate the Canadian Parliament demanding copyright reforms that keep their piracy-enabling business models alive. CCER recently posted [...]
Canada “increasingly used as torrent site host”
Posted by on March 25, 2010
A new study by Envisional takes an interesting look at the aftermath of the Mininova decision last fall. Future of Copyright offers a good summary of the report. In light of the ruling against Mininova compelling the BitTorrent index site to cease hosting torrent files corresponding to infringing content, Envisional decided to track where all [...]
Reaching new lows – charity album piracy
Posted by on March 1, 2010
Those who engage in music piracy will often list a familiar set of excuses to justify IP theft: the album is too expensive, the labels don’t make it available in digital format, artists don’t receive a big enough portion of album revenues, downloaded albums serve as promotional tools for the band’s concerts and merchandise, the [...]
Finnish label Lion Music speaks out against file-sharing
Posted by on January 5, 2010
Continuing on yesterday’s theme of artists speaking out on illegal P2P downloading, the Finnish independent recording label Lion Music has posted the views of several of their signed artists on the effect that illegal downloading has had on their careers and livelihood. These musicians are to be commended for being frank about the damage P2P file-sharing has [...]
