By Ahmad Hathout
Canada’s largest broadcasters are once again asking for a court order to actively block websites that are allegedly streaming their content without a licence.
The broadcasters, including Rogers, Bell, Groupe TVA, and Fubo TV, filed with the Federal Court on April 5 a request for a dynamic site blocking order to eliminate from view the illegal streaming of sports content to which they have the sole rights to broadcast.
An order of this kind would mean that internet service providers, who are applicants and third parties in this case, will be forced to actively block during the streaming of the sports event a list of IP addresses that are found to be violating the copyright of the rightsholders. The result is that Canadians won’t be able to access the content, which is often delivered through browsers and unlicensed IPTV subscription services that cost in the range of $10 to $20 per month.
“In order to assess the scope and combat the piracy of Protected Live Content, the Applicants mandated a third party vendor to conduct monitoring during part of the 2023-2024 NHL season, the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 NBA seasons and the 2023-2024 Premier League season,” the broadcaster said in their court filing. “This monitoring identified thousands of instances, and in some cases tens of thousands, where Unauthorized Streaming Servers provided unauthorized access to NHL and NBA Live Games and Premier League Live Matches accessible from Canada.”
The broadcasters have identified names of the targeted infringers, including EPLLive.net, rainostream.net, Cobra IPTV, Best IPTV.
The broadcasters note that it is difficult to catch the operators of these services because they are often located in different countries and actively try to conceal their identities by changing the IP addresses. They said they have tried hiring a third party vendor to send “hundreds of thousands of notices” to hosting providers “asking them to forward a notice of infringement to the operators of the Unauthorized Streaming Servers,” but received no response.
The applicants have already previously gone after operators of servers that they could identify and that are located in Canada. Some of these legal proceedings involved names including “IPTV Express,” “Epic Stream,” “Beast IPTV,” “SmoothStreams,” and “IP Guys.”
The broadcasters have previously been successful in getting live blocking orders on targets illegally streaming NHL and baseball games and major soccer events.
“Notwithsanding these efforts, Unauthorized Streaming Servers providing access to high quality streams of NHL and NBA Live Games, and Premier League Live Matches in Canada are still widespread and can be accessed easily by consumers with a simple search on a search engine, and in many cases for free,” the broadcasters said.
“Given the large number of operators of Unauthorized Streaming Servers in the present case and the fact that they are almost exclusively located outside of Canada, it is impossible for the Applicants to identify and prosecute them all,” they added.
Photo of unlicensed content interface, via complaint.
