If You Get a Letter About Illegal Downloading, Maybe You Should Ignore It

Voltage says there's only way to take part in the McConaissance. Screencap via. 

On Friday, news broke that Canada’s federal court came to a decision regarding a demand from Voltage Pictures, a production studio responsible The Hurt Locker and Dallas Buyers Club along with a smattering of unknown movies, that wanted Canada’s most downloader-friendly ISP, TekSavvy, to release the identities of subscribers that Voltage alleged had illegally downloaded their films. As I wrote in December 2012, this case has all the hallmarks of copyright trolling; a legal practice that has clogged up courtrooms in the United States with mass amounts of lawsuits that tend to go nowhere.

To launch this noble legal crusade, Voltage teamed up with an organization called Canipre, which exists simply to punish Canadian downloaders who are getting away with virtual larceny. Canipre proudly claims that when copyright-infringement hooligans are “asked” to stop downloading, 95% of them do. This unverifiable statistic alludes to the funny logic and threatening tactics that studios like Voltage have adopted. Canipre is the same organization that VICE’s West Coast Editor, Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, pointed out was also guilty of copyright infringement.

Hilariously apt hypocrisy aside, Voltage Pictures fought to get contact information for about 2,000 TekSavvy users so it could send them threatening letters, in order to cash in off of their fear. While these letters are designed to indicate some kind of forthcoming legal threat, in reality, if the downloader doesn’t pay up there’s very little chance that an actual lawsuit will follow (based on American precedents). As these cases have spread across the United States, there are online resources like Fight Copyright Trolls, which have been created for people caught up in this shakedown system. The Pietz Law Firm, an LA Based intellectual property practice, has a whole page on their site for “Slaying the Copyright Troll.”

In it they write: “the troll is really after… a few thousand easy dollars. Litigation is very difficult and expensive. What the troll really wants are any easy settlements that can be obtained without having to do the work of actually serving a lawsuit and then litigating it in court… It is no surprise or coincidence that many copyright trolls price their monetary settlement demands at around the same price that it costs to hire a defense lawyer. Most lawyers will charge you a few thousand dollars to represent you in a case like this.”

They offer a solution called the “ostrich defense,” named after the flightless weirdo bird’s tendency to bury its head in the sand and cut off the outside world—which would be completely inadvisable and wildly irresponsible if you were charged with a real crime where someone got hurt, or physical property was damaged. But apparently in the world of copyright trolling, you can basically just pretend like nothing ever happened: “Pretend there is not a problem, and hope that the lawsuit simply goes away. As I noted above, there is actually a good chance that the case will eventually go away. So this approach can actually be effective. Many trolls never bother to serve people with the lawsuit (which is required if you want to actually bring a case to trial) after they get their list of names from the ISP’s. For the copyright troll, time is better spent simply trying to collect from their list of names than actually litigating.”

Of course, this approach would not guarantee that you will be absolved from all legal threats nor does this article constitute legal advice. Plus, I would imagine that many people who happen to receive these letters do in fact panic, pay the troll toll, and throw their computer out of a window to prevent it from ever happening again. The United States has also dealt cases where porn studios have tried trolling people in the same way; imagine getting a letter from a mysterious organization telling you they know about your porn habit and they were going to come after you in court? Mortifying.

Canipre, well aware of the ominous properties of red text. Screencap via.

One such porn trolling case, which was filed by a classy group called Sunlust Pictures, was thrown out of a Tampa courtroom for “attempted fraud on the Court” after no actual Sunlust Pictures employees attended the proceeding. Apparently Sunlust sent a man to represent them who was not an attorney, nor was he an employee of said porn studio that has produced such hits as Trinity St. Clair’s Sexual Odyssey and True Lesbians. ArsTechnica referred to the case and its massive failure as “surreal.”

Clearly the Canadian courts have been watching this headache-inducing copyright trolling cancer spread through the American courts, so while Voltage Pictures did score the names of the TekSavvy users it was after, the conditions under which it is allowed to contact said users have been heavily regulated by the courts to make sure this kind of nonsense doesn’t override our legal system.

As Michael Geist wrote for the Toronto Star: “The safeguards include court oversight of the ‘demand letter’ that will be sent to subscribers, with a case management judge assigned to review and approve its contents before being sent to any subscriber. Moreover, the letter must include a message in bold type that ‘no Court has yet made a determination that such subscriber has infringed or is liable in any way for payment of damages.’” Voltage Pictures is also on the hook to pay TekSavvy for their “costs” in digging up this subscriber info and providing it to the movie studio.

So, if you did happen to download a copy of the Dallas Buyers Club or The Hurt Locker over TekSavvy’s internet-tubes, you may be in for a surprise in your mailbox sometime soon. While there’s no guarantee you will be absolved from an actual lawsuit if you ignore the thing, shred it, light it on fire, or put it in the recycling box like the eco-friendly Canadian you are, it doesn’t sound like our courts have given Voltage very many teeth to bite you with. Hopefully this will deflect future trolling cases from polluting Canada’s courts in the future; and remember: if you enjoyed watching Matthew McConaughey flip new-age AIDS medication in the fictional world of Dallas Buyers Club, maybe you should just go ahead and buy the BluRay.

@patrickmcguire