This is interesting. We've long reported on the weak copyright laws in Canada, which have made it incredibly difficult for record companies there to use the courts in their battle against P2P file sharing, and where a royalty system for online music services was only introduced last month.
Well, the owner of a Canadian website that provides links to over a million BitTorrent sources of illegal content has asked the Supreme Court Of British Columbia to rule on whether what he is doing is against the law.
The role of IsoHunt.com and its owner Gary Fung, and similar tracker services, in the illegal distribution of content is, of course, one of much debate. When such sites have been accused of infringing copyright in lawsuits in the past they always plead the same defence - they don't actually host any illegal content, they merely provide links to other people hosting illegal content; those other people, and not them, are the infringers. They may also try the old Betamax defence (or Amstrad defence in British law) whereby they argue their service has legitimate uses - unsigned bands may legitimately provide links to their own content - and that therefore their website can't be blocked, even though the majority of people use it for illegal purposes, ie providing links to unlicensed content.
Both defences have succeeded in court in various territories, though in more recent years (and especially in the US post the landmark Supreme Court ruling on the MGM v Grokster lawsuit) the courts have tended to be less willing to protect such P2P and tracker services if the owners [a] fail to put in place appropriate measures to filter out unlicensed content or [b] make it pretty obvious through their communication with punters that the service exists to access illegal content (perhaps by calling your service The Pirate Bay).
But what about in Canada, where judges have often said current copyright law is too vague to be applied to the digital domain? With a lawsuit incoming from the Motion Picture Association of America and cease and desist letters from the Canadian Recording Industry Association, IsoHunt.com owner Fung has asked for clarification, once and for all, from the Supreme Court of British Columbia as to whether he is violating the country's Copyright Act.
Fung told reporters: "We filed the court documents because we were threatened by CRIA. Essentially they're saying that all we do is infringe on their clients' [the labels] copyrights". In his court papers, Fung says: "IsoHunt does not consider that its operations ... infringe or violate in any way the Copyright Act and therefore seeks the protection of [the court] in the form of declaratory relief in relation to clarification of its legal rights in respect of its operation".
As previously reported, Chinese search engine Baidu successfully defended itself against legal action from the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry in relation to its MP3 search service which provides easy access to illegal sources of music, though a subsequent change in Chinese law means the IFPI is confident of winning its case against the search firm on its second hearing. It will be interesting if the courts in Canada rule that they, by contrast, are unable to stop websites like IsoHunt from operating. Such a ruling would definitely send the CRIA into a lobbying frenzy, to persuade Canadian politicians to speed up the much needed reform (in the industry's eyes) of the country's copyright laws.