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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, 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.
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(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.
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(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.