Over the last week or so, I have seen a lot of posts on Facebook about people worrying about the new copyright law that came into effect here in Canada. I have also been seeing a lot of people freaking out about it and thought I would explain it in my own words.
Let’s compare your downloading of the latest Katy Perry album, to using your vehicle as the getaway car in a bank robbery. You drive your car to the bank, get out, go inside, rob the bank, and escape in your car. The bank security guard chases you outside and manages to write down your New Brunswick license plate number. At that point, the license plate number is the only thing that ties you to the bank robbery. That number by itself is meaningless. But matching that number to the owner of the car is definitely useful.
The bank gets a lawyer to ask a judge for a court order to force the DMV to give them the name of the owner of the car. Once they have the name of owner of the car, they come find you, arrest you, and throw you in jail.
Now instead of robbing a bank, you downloaded that album. Instead of the license plate on the car, it’s the IP address of the computer used to download the album. Instead of the DMV, it’s your internet provider (ISP) giving the details of who had the IP address at the time the illegal download occurred.
When you downloaded that new album off Pirate Bay, you connected your computer to the internet using an IP address which belongs to your internet provider. In order to provide you access to the internet, that provider needs to know who was assigned what IP address and when. This information is kept for a certain amount of time, depending on the provider. The record company tracks torrent sites like Pirate Bay (and many others) to see who downloads their copyrighted works. When you downloaded the album, the record company saw your IP address and noted what you were downloading. They then looked up who owns that IP address and obtained the name of your internet provider. If they wanted to, they could then go to a judge, get a court order for the provider to release your name, and then come after you.
Copyright owners have been monitoring illegal downloads of their works for years. In the US, those same copyright owners have been forcing internet providers to give up the names of the people associated to the internet accounts used for downloading. They then come up with some ridiculous amount of money to sue them by and walk away with buckets of cash.
Here’s how it’s different in Canada.
The new Canadian law states that a copyright holder (movie/record company) can only “ask” an internet company to issue a “notice” to one of their customers that they may have downloaded illegal content. The ISP is now compelled to comply with this request. They do NOT however have to release any information on who the customer is unless the copyright holder has a court order. This means that even if the notice is sent, the copyright holder still doesn’t know who you are unless they go to a court of law and request a court order for the internet company to give up your details.
Now the part that REALLY matters. You cannot be sued for millions of dollars for downloading movies and music if you live in Canada. A company can threaten you all they want but they’ll never get more than the maximum amount allowable by Canadian law: $5,000. According to Section 38.1b of Bill C-11 (The Copyright Modernization Act), no one person can be charged more than $5,000 for ALL infringements incurred for non-commercial purposes. This is the BIG catch that people are not realizing.
What this really means is that by law, those huge lawsuits for thousands of dollars cannot happen in Canada. Canadian law now clearly states that 5K is the max penalty for ALL infringements. That means if you downloaded 100 movies from 20th Century Fox or 1,000 songs from Sony Music, you can only be charged $5,000 in total. If you’re selling those works, the penalty is higher, but for personal use, it’s $5,000.
If for some reason you actually did receive some sort of notice from an official movie studio or record label, and they try to tell you that you owe them thousands and thousands of dollars, you know that is not the case because the law clearly states the maximum penalty for all infringements is $5,000.
What does this actually mean?
It means the odds of any copyright owner coming after you for downloading that Katy Perry album is slim to none. It costs a lot of money to pay a lawyer to get that original court order, and even more money to actually take someone to court. Since the amount of money they would spend on litigation would far exceed $5,000, there’s no money in it for the copyright owners to go after illegal downloaders in Canada.
So, take a deep breath, calm down, and feel a bit more at ease knowing those high profile lawsuits are not coming to Canada anytime soon.
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Addendum – January 6th, 1:41pm
After posting this on Facebook, one of my geocaching friends asked a very good question so I thought I would add it here and provide more info.
I have a question. Let’s say there are 6 adults living in the same house and one person is illegally downloading movies. How would the ISP know who actually broke the law? Would they send the notice to whoever is the account holder? Wouldn’t they have to charge the person that broke the law?
The ISP would have no idea, nor would the copyright holder. They only know that a device from that IP address was used to illegally download a movie. This is the reason many of the lawsuits in the US were thrown out because an IP is not a person. The IP is assigned to the router in your home (See NAT to understand internal vs external IP addresses). Any devices within that home that are connected to the router appear to have the same IP address to the rest of the world. It would be up to the copyright owner to confront the name of the person on the account to determine who the culprit really is. In some cases this would be pretty obvious and in others, not so obvious.
Another possibility is for those who have “open” hotspots in their home, someone could park their car in front of the house, leach your wifi, download movies illegally, then drive away. When the copyright holder comes knocking, no one in the home knows anything about it but the logs clearly show someone from that home downloaded something. In cases like this, the account holder would likely have to try and prove it wasn’t them. In many of those cases, it’s pretty obvious the homeowners were oblivious.
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