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What Happens When Telecom Companies Search Your Home for Piracy
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Canadian citizen has house raided, all electronic devices copied, compelled to divulge accounts and passwords, is interrogated for 16 hours, and it is a *civil* complaint... he's already on the hook for a $50,000 payment to the plaintiffs, and he has not even been to trial yet.
When 30-year-old web developer Adam Lackman heard loud knocking on his Montreal apartment door around 8 AM, he thought he was about to be robbed.
When the police showed up after about 20 minutes, according to Lackman, he opened the door and was met by lawyers, a bailiff, and, rather ominously, a locksmith. Seeing that he wasn't about to be mugged, the police left.
One of the lawyers represented some of Canada's most powerful telecommunications and media companies: Bell, Rogers, Vidéotron, and TVA. The other was there to be an independent observer on behalf of the court. Lackman was told that he was being sued for copyright infringement for operating TVAddons, a website that hosted user-created apps for streaming video over the internet. The crew was there with a civil court order allowing them to search the place.
The search was only supposed to go from 8 AM to 8 PM but it ended at midnight. The team copied laptops, hard drives, and any other devices they found, and demanded logins and passwords. Lackman, who called a lawyer in to represent him, was questioned for nine hours by the opposing counsel. They presented him with a list of names of people suspected of being digital pirates in Canada and asked him to snitch. He didn't recognize the names, he told me, and said nothing.
[...] Now, Lackman is embroiled in expensive legal proceedings for a case that pits him against several telecom corporations and media companies, ultimately to answer: Was TVAddons a platform for innovative streaming apps, or was it designed to enable piracy?
[...] Lackman ran TVAddons, a website that hosted unofficial apps (referred to as "addons") for Kodi, a popular open-source media center that allows users to stream media from their devices and over the internet.
[...] The lawyers obtained an injunction that prevented Lackman from operating TVAddons and ordered him to hand over login credentials so that a court-authorized technician could shut down the site and social media accounts.
[...More]
They also got an "Anton Piller" order, which allowed the lawyers—as well as a supervising agent of the court, bailiffs, and technical experts—to enter his home and search the place for devices, hard drives, and documents, and to preserve any evidence they found.
It's as close as you're going to get in civil law to criminal interrogation and seizure
[...] According to Israel, this is the harsh reality of being a small player sued by telecoms and media companies in Canada, where the dominance of the "big three"—Rogers, Bell, and Telus, the latter of which isn't involved in Lackman's litigation—is often referred to as a telecom oligopoly.
The case highlights an imbalance of power, Israel said, "where individuals who experience harms don't have the resources to advance them."
Deep-pocketed companies, on the other hand, "not only have the resources to pursue [perceived harms] to the point where individuals don't have the ability to defend themselves, but also to advance mechanisms with fewer safeguards," Israel said.
[...] Even though the parties are now negotiating a payment plan, uncertainties abound—nobody knows what will happen to Lackman now, least of all him. As his lawyer Renno put it, the case is remarkably still in "very, very early stages."
And that is the point: in the new Canadian anti-piracy regime led by powerful companies, just being accused of enabling piracy can come with immense personal consequences even before your day in court.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday November 01 2018, @02:17PM (14 children)
Including these:
So what we're really looking at is another style of Mega case. Person builds something that gets used for copyright violation and releases it to public. Person doesn't police what others tacked on to the repository. Other side thinks the primary purpose of this repository is facilitating piracy. Person is named as a party. Why is that surprising?
Let's look at the other side. This law is used in cases where it is felt that critical evidence may be destroyed on a regular compel-and-produce subpoena. Are those fears justified in the case of someone suspected of facilitating copyright infringement? Does the other side, if they've made a prima facie case, not have a right to inspect the other side's files and emails for evidence that there was active facilitation going on (a la Mega?) If you're producer of something that is built to do nothing but facilitate piracy (not saying TVAddons is here - I don't know) and you've got a hard drive full of emails showing that you full well know exactly what the plugin and repository are being used for copyright infringement, are you just going to turn over that hard drive on a subpoena? Or might you try "sanitizing" it first?
This isn't just "person shared some files, person gets a search warrant." The story is in fact more complex than the summary indicates, no matter if you side with Adam Lackman or not. And before you put something out for public consumption, these days, you certainly do have an obligation to consider its uses and/or how it is being used.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday November 01 2018, @02:45PM (5 children)
AKA "As property of the state, we're all obligated to ensure the continued success of obsolete business models"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday November 01 2018, @03:42PM (4 children)
Also AKA (for the United States not Canada) the services sector makes up 80% of GDP and 79% of employment (source [trade.gov]). Arts, entertainment, recreation, accomodation, and food service made up 4% of 2017 GDP ( source [statista.com] .) Not huge and with lots of fuzz in it, but a not insignificant amount of GDP at 1 part in 25, so you tell me if it is a matter of national economic security? And time will tell just how obsolete the model is - me, I think now we might always have middlemen in entertainment. They'll just be fewer of them taking larger gulps individually like every other sector.
And also AKA this isn't just a run of the mill case focusing on a sharer, but a developer and accused facilitator. This reads to me a having much more in common to the case of Eric Lundgren [soylentnews.org] than it does Crain / Foster / Santangello [arstechnica.com]. Is it defensible? Quite probably so, depending on the details. Is the defendant actually at fault? Quite probably not, depending on the details. Are the MAFIAAs doing something wrong? Quite probably not, depending on the details. All of which are details that wouldn't be in TFA.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 01 2018, @11:31PM (3 children)
What is it with you consistently defending copywrong thugs? Why even support this sort of authoritarianism? What do you get out of it?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @03:48AM (1 child)
I'm not sure why I'm feeding you, but OK. Because we live in a society. Because by and large I like that society.
Do I "always" defend it? Hell no! Look elsewhere in this very thread and others and you'll see that I think that the current notion of letting copyright exist for even the creator's lifetime is not a good idea. I have lots of other beefs and uncertainties too. But if you're asking why do I think copyright is a good idea? Because it gives the creator of a work some degree of control of it, and I think a creator of a work should have some degree of control over it. Because giving the creator of a work an exclusive license for a time to say how and when the work is distributed can make a good creation valuable monetarily to the author and therefore authors of creative works can, in theory, make a living by being creative. So, no, I find a lot more wrong with the notion that anything which is created should be allowed to be copied by anyone at any time for any reason because somebody doesn't think they owe any kind of payment to enjoy that creation - that's the real copywrong.
What do I get out of it? Some really good entertainment that I'm not capable of creating myself. That I pay for. And I don't mind saying that I believe you should be paying for it too if you're going to participate.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Friday November 02 2018, @12:40PM
The intent of patent and copyright laws was to protect small independent innovators from theft of their ideas by the richest individuals and corporations. But the result has been the exact opposite, the richest individuals and corporations use copyright and patent laws to make exploitative contracts with creators and bury smaller competitors with lawsuits. Look at the music industry, in which musicians often end up signing contracts that take away their rights to their own music and they get tiny fractions of the revenue from sales. Look at patents, where competitive companies are crushed with patent lawsuits and inventions worth a fortune result in a 5% raise to the team members that created them while the managers and executives walk away with millions.
Also consider that great music comes from adopting and mixing ideas from tunes that are out of copyright - old folk songs, old blues, classical music. Anyone can write a story about Sherlock Holmes, Achilles, Loki, Captain Nemo, King Arthur, Robin Hood.
Until someone figures out how to rewrite intellectual property law from the ground up, it is simply a tool of the oligarchs.
You might say, "But how would artists and creators make money otherwise?" Well, I still go to concerts and go to movie theaters. People will still pay for entertainment. Those companies wouldn't make as much money as they do under copyright law, but this is one of the many cases in which the cure (copyright law) is worse than the disease.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday November 02 2018, @03:50AM
And I wasn't logged in. I wrote the post above this one (3:48AM). Just so it is square.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Thursday November 01 2018, @07:25PM (5 children)
These Kodi addons scrape the content from elsewhere, and streaming infringing content is not illegal (in U.S. or Canada... yet).
We've regressed to linking being a crime. But that's bound to happen when the imaginary property industries have lobbyists and Pirates don't.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday November 01 2018, @09:30PM (4 children)
Streaming infringing content may be legal for now or it may be found not to be -the courts tend to make the law on this stuff because the legislatures won't touch it. But again, this isn't about streaming. Facilitating that streaming may not be [wikipedia.org], if the addons have a maintainer and it is found that the addon has no purpose beyond facilitation of infringement. No more or less legal or illegal than Napster 1.0 or Megaupload, so I don't see where the regression is.
TFA also mentions the concept that the app automatically recommends things. And yep, link away to something in a way that makes it clear you're just helping infringement to happen with no other redeeming value.... yes you have done something to interfere with the legal rights of someone else. Why should that be legal? Facilitating other offenses is not - civilly it means you bear responsibility for the actions and criminally it makes you an accessory.
But I do agree with you: There's money on the side of the industry... and there are people who pay money to that industry. And a society that depends on that property - imaginary or not - may need to defend it by having laws in place. The U.S. long ago passed the point where its physical manufacturing would keep it alive.
Is it all BS? Maybe - I'm very split on it and I see absolutely no reason that generations should pass with material still held in copyright by anyone. Yet that's the society we have built and it seems like it is the price to have Disneyworld and Universal Studios and support thousands upon thousands of laborers making the stuff.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday November 01 2018, @09:58PM (3 children)
It's virtually impossible to stop piracy. Even this convenient Kodi-based piracy which partially relies on centralization can work pretty well and has resisted attempts to completely shut it down. An American or Canadian is low-hanging fruit; you can't as easily take down an Eastern European, or someone who has anonymized their activity properly.
The industry might not care if a few nerds engage in piracy or use torrents. They won't care about some sort of decentralized sharing platform that barely anybody uses. What they don't want is for normal folks to hop on the bandwagon and use a convenient, Netflix-like interface for streaming. Because then the "House of Cards" could fall. So they are targeting the weakest links to muddy the waters. Go after some easy-to-nab app developers. Stop the sale of "fully loaded" Kodi sticks that don't require user installation and configuration.
But at the end of the day, the "property" is trivial to copy for essentially $0. And the technology continues to get better and cheaper. Come back in 2025, and you'll see cheaper storage with larger capacities, cheaper bandwidth, and smaller video files due to new codecs such as AV1. Hopefully, these developments will make it easier and cheaper to host pirated streaming content. Or it could mean we see more reliable and user-friendly decentralized networks that pose fresh new challenges to the industry.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday November 02 2018, @04:07AM (2 children)
Maybe all of the above, sure.
We may also see new ways for content producers to lock their material back down and a return to private codecs with DRM baked in on a much tighter level, unless you've paid for it. HTML5 support was just the first shot. Just as likely given that the new-world distributors (Amazon and Netflix to name two) are now financing the creation of the content themselves.... the second it becomes more profitable for them to *not* release something to DVD or BluRay but keep it exclusively on their proprietary viewers with proprietary codecs I think we might see anything but bootleg retaping gone. Or at least a return back to the arms war of DRM. Dunno if you remember the days of homemade cassette mixtapes from radio or other sources... but most of them sucked without a lot of effort involved. And they still went after the mass distributors of counterfeits.
But you're right that the industry doesn't currently care about who's using it anymore. Not nearly as much as those who are distributing it on scales that might actually damage the money they make from it. And the focus of this story isn't about, "a few nerds engaging in piracy or us[ing] torrents." It's about someone creating a system being used at scale by which the agreements which make the money to produce the content in the first place is devalued. They don't care about single end users as much as shutting down the people responsible for the creation of the platforms. Given the current political climate's tendency to hold technology responsible for user's actions regarding speech.... I think it's far more fragile than you're giving it credit for.
This story was just a single instance. Maybe even a test case for this tactic to become more mainstream. And again, I don't have to like that, or defend them, to see the reality that they've moved from busting the drug users to trying to go after those they think are drug dealers. Either way - defending the old or heralding the new - might be tuning up the lyre while the first reports of fire are heard in Rome, anyway. Will they be successful? Stay tuned.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 02 2018, @04:56AM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole [wikipedia.org]
I see that Netflix's Daredevil S03 can be downloaded in 4K. DRM must not be working out for them.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday November 02 2018, @12:30PM
I saw someone speeding past me on the road yesterday. I guess all those speed laws are all useless and should be repealed. An accident occurred while someone was texting today... guess those anti-texting laws must not be working out either. And a murder happened yesterday, too. So let's just make all killing legal, OK?
Also, "we may also see" as in future tense. Sure the analog hole will still exist - I specifically made reference to that. But true analog recordings can suck, too. In any event, the law is on the side
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by termigator on Thursday November 01 2018, @09:43PM (1 child)
Yeah, just like gun manufacturers[/sarcasm]
It is a slippery slope to hold someone legally accountable for a tool/utility based on how other folks use the tool for illegal activities.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday November 02 2018, @04:18AM
It certainly can be a slippery slope. And I won't say that's "right" either. But here's the deal: Guns *have other uses* besides illegal activities. And that seems to be the current acid test for secondary infringements - if it can be reasonably proven that a technology has other uses besides piracy (maybe more realistically is currently being used for such) it becomes a gun and is legal. Then you go after those using it illegally. If it has no use but infringement... there is no real equivalent directly in US weapons law but it might be regarded as something akin to a nuclear weapon - there is no way a government will allow such to be in private hands and you shouldn't expect an ATF tax stamp will cover it.
This sig for rent.