By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Rogers and Quebecor’s Groupe TVA have jointly filed a request asking the Federal Court to order people behind IP addresses allegedly illegally streaming live Major League Baseball games to stop and pay damages, according to court documents filed last week.
The companies, which own the exclusive Canadian broadcasting rights to the Toronto Blue Jays games, say they don’t know the people behind the operation of the addresses.
A “significant number of Canadian consumers” are turning to “unauthorized, user-friendly” websites to get access to infringing live television content, according to the complaint, including highly popular live sports. Consumers can access the content via websites on their browsers or through set-top boxes with dedicated software that pulls links to the streams.
A single stream can be projected to hundreds or thousands of users, the complaint says, thereby reducing the need to access the content from the official broadcasters. Friend MTS, the agent the companies hired to conduct analysis, found 98 per cent of IP addresses streaming this content are based outside of Canada.
“Live sports events such as MLB Live Games are particularly important for the Plaintiffs,” the filing said, adding “they are very popular in Canada.”
Last year, MLB live games and related programming accounted for 40 per cent of Rogers Sportsnet’s overall viewership, the filing said. For Quebecor’s TVA’s, the MLB live games during the summer months accounted for 80 per cent of its sports viewership.
Rogers and TVA said they spend tens of millions of dollars a year just for the rights to the games and not including investments for development and production.
After an application to restrain the defendants is filed, the companies will often follow-up with a request for the court to force internet service providers in Canada to block the IP addresses transmitting the illegal content.
In October, on request from Bell, a Federal Court judge ordered ISPs to actively block the websites of possible streamers of the FIFA World Cup before the soccer matches were even played.
The precedent for the real-time blocking of live sports games was already established about four months earlier, when the same court approved a dynamic blocking order against illegal streamers of National Hockey League games.
