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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.

Original Submission