TorrentFreak

Following an important court ruling last week, thousands of Canadians are now at risk of being exposed to mass BitTorrent lawsuits. That’s the message from the boss an anti-piracy outfit who says is company has been monitoring BitTorrent networks for infringements and has amassed data on millions of users. The court ruling involved just 50 Canadians but another case on the horizon involves thousands of alleged pirates.

As noted by Prof. Geist ealier today, the consumer-related aspects of Canada’s C-11 copyright bill come into force today. Specifically, he lists the following provisions gained by Canadian Citizens. The addition of education, parody, and satire as fair dealing purposes. The creation of a non-commercial user generated content provision that creates a legal safe harbour [...]

Like many other websites on the Internet The Pirate Bay makes its money from ads. Due to its reputation the torrent site generally has to settle for lower grade banners, but the Canadian Government recently broke this trend. This week ads from the Canadian Department of Finance’s Economic Action Plan appeared on The Pirate Bay. Unfortunately for the infamous torrent site, the feds pulled the banner campaign as soon as they were alerted to it.

Once again showing the lack of foresight, the Canadian Copyright Board approved new fees for live events. These fees, paid to collection group RE:Sound, will be in addition to those already paid to SOCAN (the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada), and on top of the fees Canadians already pay when buying [...]

Politicians are always going the extra mile for their supporters, and nothing spells that out more clearly than this video, taken from the Canadian Parliaments discussion into C-11, the current attempt to give Hollywood what they want in Canada. In it, MP Dean Del Mastro tries to make a comparison for format shifting, and why it’s [...]

The United States Trade Representative has once again labeled Canada as a piracy haven. In its yearly report on countries that are not doing enough to protect the U.S. copyright industry, Canada is listed on the Priority Watch List with China, Russia, Ukraine and a handful of other countries. The Special 301 Report reads: “Canada [...]

While most of the major entertainment industry companies wage war against BitTorrent sites, the Songwriters Association of Canada prefers to embrace file-sharing. Speaking with TorrentFreak, vice president Jean-Robert Bisaillon says that the Internet has revived the music business. Sharing music is part of people’s nature and the songwriters want to legalize file-sharing, while compensating the artists whose works are shared.