Toronto - Pirate Party of Canada condemns attempts to bring the U.S. style Speculative Invoicing (aka "copyright trolling") to Canada. The Pirate Party  encourages the courts and ISPs to anticipate and reject discovery requests based on IP addresses allegedly associated with copyright infringement. These fishing expeditions leads to wrongful accusation of innocent users. The practice are often carried out by businesses looking to earn money at the expense of the internet users. A case in U.K. involves a grandfather who was accused of copyright infringement despite not having the knowledge about using torrent or managing a WIFI network. People who chose to keep their WIFI network open due to technical ignorance or personal reason should not be made to prove their innocence. Businesses should not be allowed to exercise extrajudicial overreach without first proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Tactics used by copyright trolls involves aggressive threat of litigation against the alleged infringer. Faced with the possibility of expensive and time consuming litigation, the alleged infringer are often forced to settle and pay fines outside the judicial system. 

 

Walking through a residential neighbourhood will turn up multiple homes which have unsecured WiFi connections, some on purpose, but some because they don't know any better. Any person can hop on that wireless connection and download copyrighted materials. While advocating all Canadians to educate themselves on technology, the Pirate Party also realizes that not every person has the time or understanding to fix their WiFi, nor should they be obligated to. Depending on the quality of the WIFI encryption and equipment, some could also easily be compromised without the owner's knowledge.

 

Using torrent swarms to determine copyright infringement shows a fundamental lack of understanding about how torrents work. When a person initiates a torrent download, they get connected to what is called "the swarm". Many companies like Canipre simply connect to these swarms, and scrape all the IP addresses which are connected to them, but ironically this shows the very flaw in using this method: You can connect to a swarm, without downloading content. You can also download incomplete bits of data for research, which is not infringing as the bytes on their own do not create copyrighted material. 

 

"We look at one of the largest British copyright trolls Davenport Lyons who were found guilty of violating six of rules of the Solicitors Regulation Authority and were fined and suspended. Prenda law in the United States are being investigated for identity theft and other abusive practices. Righthaven had it's company's assets seized after it's cases were getting thrown out of US courts and were losing lawsuits."  Pirate Party leader Travis McCrea explains, "this isn't about protecting intellectual property rights, it's about making money for lawyers and the industry bodies which hire them. It is an effort by US media powerhouses to Americanize Canada for it's own benefit."

 

The Pirate Party recommends that if you are using an ISP which is giving up your private information based on flimsy evidence, you no longer support that business. Further, the Pirate Party encourages Canadians to demand  the CRTC establish privacy policies which will protect consumers from organizations which attempt to gather customer records without a court order. We would like to ask  the government and the courts to order businesses to cease this type of operation before any Canadians suffers any injustices and have their privacy violated without the due process of a court. We ask all ISP to continue to reject threats from the copyright trolls and refuse to handover data without a court order, as have previously been done by Teksavvy.

 

The medium for distributing media and information has changed from the old expensive method that relied on few major players. The copyright  industry would do  best if they adopt the new technology and use its  promising features to  offer content the way the users wants. Our  society should not bend  backwards to satisfy an old and obsolete  business model that refuses to  advance with time. Blockbusters rental  chain going out of business demonstrates that some business model become obsolete with times if they don't change. We should make sure that the major U.S. copyright group is not allowed to harrass Canadians outside the judicial process.