OTTAWA – Back in the summer, as we reported, Justices from the Federal Court ordered the individuals operating the so-called GoldTV Services to cease operations.
They are unauthorized subscription services that provide access to programming content over the Internet without having obtained the rights, a violation of the Copyright Act, and Bell Media, Groupe TVA, and Rogers Media had all pursued the matter in court.
Despite the issuance of injunctions, the Court, in a decision released last week, says some of the GoldTV services remain in operation and the infringements continue.
Last Friday, the Complainants against Gold, Rogers, Bell and TVA, were successful in getting the Federal Court to issue a site-blocking order to compel the third party respondents (Bell, Eastlink, Cogeco, Distributel, Fido, Rogers, SaskTel, Shaw, TekSavvy, Telus and Videotron) to block access to the websites operated by GoldTV.
Bell, Rogers, Videotron, and Fido agree with the issuance of such an order while Eastlink, SaskTel, Shaw and Telus take no position. Distributel and Cogeco don’t question the merits of the motion but do not agree with the proposed wording of the order.
TekSavvy opposes the motion on a variety of grounds, one of which was that this is CRTC jurisdiction, that it is not an adequate remedy and will not be effective, arguing it would be easy to circumvent. The Court dismissed those arguments. TekSavvy further said in court documents that, “despite having the ability to comply with the orders, it lacks a system or business to do so. It also notes that re-routing users attempting to access a blocked site to an information page would almost never be possible on systems using modern secure DNS servers.” In other words, it is complex for a small operator.
The Court was not moved by those arguments and reminded TekSavvy that the order provides compensation.
So the Court orders that: “Within 15 days of the issuance of this order the ISP mentioned shall block or attempt to block access by at least their residential wireline Internet service customers to the websites (…) by blocking or attempting to block access to the Target websites’ domains, subdomains and IP addresses identified therein.”
Section 36 of the Telecommunications Act states: “Except where the Commission approves otherwise, a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public.”
Although TekSavvy said in the proceeding it believes the Applicants will require the permission of the CRTC, the ruling did not elaborate on this assertion any further.
“We are aware of the decision, but we have no further comment,” CRTC spokesperson, Patricia Valladao wrote in an email to Cartt.ca.
The Court ruling states in its first paragraph that the Third Party Respondents (ISPs) are innocents, while the defendants (GoldTV) are anonymous. This tells us that this appears to be an imperfect solution.
It seems unlikely this order would be appealed, but something tells us we will be writing about this issue again.
