By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Two companies that retransmitted Videotron television signals to hotel rooms were found liable for copyright violations during a certain period, a Federal Court judge ruled last week.
Back in February 2021, as reported by Cartt.ca, Videotron filed a lawsuit against a trio of companies for allegedly redistributing its TVA channels to hotels by projecting a single signal of the channels to multiple hotel rooms, which the Montreal-based company said contravened the Copyright Act because it was allegedly done over the Internet.
On Thursday, a Federal Court ruled that Technologies Konek inc. and Coopérative de câblodistribution Hill Valley violated copyright retransmission rules over a period before February 2021, when retransmitting Videotron’s signals. The court, however, also ruled that, between February 2021 and the summer of that year, the defendants made right and were thereafter onside of copyright rules at that point.
“Quebecor takes piracy very seriously and will continue identifying resellers and taking all necessary legal action to protect the rights of subsidiaries actively engaged in creating and redistributing content, for the benefit of its cultural workers,” Videotron said in a press release on Monday. “Piracy and content theft cannot be condoned if cultural industries are to thrive. Such illegal appropriation causes losses in the millions of dollars and jeopardizes the entire content creation chain.”
Videotron’s original lawsuit requested $5 million in damages, but no such amount was included in Thursday’s decision.
Videotron said it first started noticing the issue in early 2020, when a number of its hotel customers unsubscribed from its TV services and began using Konek. According to court documents, Videotron hired two technical experts to take up rooms at the hotels and investigate the technology used by the defendants.
Videotron argued Hill Valley and Konek were not exempt under copyright law to redistribute Videotron’s TV signals. The central question on which this relied was whether the defendants retransmitted the signal using a private network, which was within the legal boundary of redistribution, or the public Internet, which would violate the law.
One of Videotron’s technical experts was able to intercept Internet address data flowing between the defendants’ and the hotel boxes, according to the court documents. Those Internet addresses were then taken to a multimedia device, which was able to rebroadcast the TVA channels, the documents said. This test, Videotron argued, showed that the defendants – behind the veil of retransmitting via a private network – were using the public Internet for rebroadcasting.
The decision comes during a years-long effort by the big telecoms with television businesses to stem the rise of illegal redistribution of unlicensed content by third-party IPTV service providers which aggregate the content and sell them for a fraction of what it would cost to purchase each individual channel or package.
