Mark Twain once famously commented, “Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.” Canadian copyright law bears the burden of his axiom more than most. The pith of our copyright law dates from a 1911 bill passed in the United Kingdom, which we adopted wholesale in the early 1920s, and have not kept current with the changes in time.
Posts Tagged ‘bittorrent’
Study shows 97% of torrents relate to infringing copyright content
July 23rd, 2010A study by the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) has found that over 97% of .torrent files that relate to copyright works shared over BitTorrent networks relate to infringing content.
The ICSL found that 0.3% of the files sampled were confirmed as being non-infringing (True Negatives); 89% were confirmed as being infringing (True Positives); 1.6% were ambiguous where they could not determine if they were infringing or not, and .91% related to pornographic torrents. Of the torrents in the top three categories (Movies, Music and TV shows), there were no legal torrents in the sample. According to the report:
Eight things worth proroguing on TV: Pirating TV shows from BitTorrent
January 12th, 2010Did anyone catch John Doyle’s article in The Globe and Mail last week titled “Just copy Our Glorious Leader: Eight things worth proroguing on TV”?
In musing about Parliament being prorogued he suggested a list of 8 TV related items that should be prorogued. In one of them he makes the point that pirating TV shows over BitTorrent and other file sharing networks is not a victimless act. It can affect the lives of ordinary Canadians who directly or indirectly earn a living in the industry.
Here is what he had to say:
Fung and Isohunt found liable for inducing worldwide copyright infringement
December 25th, 2009Earlier this week, a US district court granted summary judgement to MPAA members holding that Gary Fung and four websites operated by him, including Isohunt one of Canada’s largest bittorrent sites, contribute to massive worldwide copyright infringement.
Operators of bittorrent sites like isoHunt often claim they are nothing but content neutral search engines like Google. The Isohunt court disagreed holding, based on uncontested expert evidence, that approximately 95 percent of all files made accessible through Isohunt were infringing or highly likely to be infringing.
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