Ontario Canipre to get peoples' personal information

[Panphobia]

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/right-click/battle-against-internet-piracy-coming-canada-172625021.html Sadly I have teksavvy for an ISP, so Canipre will be looking through my downloads. Do you guys think this is right?

[Nathan4102]

Totally against this! For one, I think people should have privacy online, and two, I'm with Teksavvy as well...

[2goto1]

They won't be looking through your downloads yet. According to the news item, "Canipre is asking the Federal Court to force Ontario-based Internet provider Teksavvy provide them with customer information."

This means that they haven't been granted legal right to the database, yet. It will be up to the Canadian Federal Court to make the final decision. Hopefully they don't allow it. Granting access would be a very slippery slope, in many different ways, that could introduce a deluge of similar cases. I'm sure the Federal Court will recognize that.

[Insectoid]

Even if they do get access, Canipre is known for not following up on lawsuits. They'll threaten you with legal action and charge a big fine, but if you don't pay the fine they don't follow through. It's worth sending out ten thousand threatening letters or emails, but with the $5000 cap on internet piracy fines, they would actually lose money if they took you to court. It's just not worth it for them.

[2goto1]

Right, which is also summarized near the end of the article:

"[Canipre] also focuses on education. According to its website, 95 per cent of people stop illegally downloading copyrighted material when asked to. Which suggests a high number of those people understand what they are doing is illegal and stop once they understand the consequences.
So while this might not be the start of an all-out copyright war, perhaps it is the beginning of an education campaign."

[Dan]

Does any one know if there are any laws in Canada or Ontario that state that an ISP has to keep logs? Or has to keep them for more then a few days?

It seems that if there is no law about it, Teksavvy could just set up there system to rotate the logs that map IPs to users every week or so. You can't subpoena logs that don't exist. It would be unreasonable to ask an ISPs to keep logs forever just from a technical standpoint.

[2goto1]

Not sure, but it seems that Teksavvy may keep 3 months worth of logs, http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r27850772-Info-Length-of-time-Canadian-ISPs-retain-IP-address-logs. Then again, another blog indicated 90 days, http://torrentfreak.com/how-long-does-your-isp-store-ip-address-logs-120629/. So there may be laws, and it may only require something relatively short lived.

I would imagine that some ISPs archive usage data to long term storage beyond their short term audit logs, for various service quality and regulatory purposes. I would also speculate that Canada's municipal police agencies, RCMP, CSIS, etc., all require ISPs to provide their logs to them on a regular basis, for the purpose of local and national security.

[randint]

Do Microsoft products like Windows and Office count as one of them when it comes to piracy?

[Nathan4102]

I doubt they'd go for people who just download a few small things (Like office and maybe windows). They're targeting the people who upload and share like 250+gb of pirated data a month. Eliminate the uploaders so the downloaders can't download.

[randint]

This is why I actually plan to move away from Microsoft products, for good.

[Panphobia]

Who downloads anymore pffft, I just stream.

[randint]

That counts as downloading too.

[Nathan4102]

How does one stream pirated goods?

[randint]

By means of P2P networks (Torrents)?

[Nathan4102]

Isn't that downloading though? Streaming would be downloading, and viewing it as you download, like a youtube video. Pretty sure that's not possible with torrents, correct me if I'm wrong.