NGN, Riding drop filesharing case against Distributel

NGN Prima Productions Inc. and Riding Films Inc. dropped a court motion that sought to compel Distributel Communications Inc. to identify its Internet customers whose accounts had been linked to peer-to-peer filesharing. In a notice filed with the Federal Court on Friday, NGN and Riding asked the court to drop their motion, which could have required Distributel to release the names and addresses of its customers whose Internet protocol (IP) addresses were linked to the online distribution of the films Recoil, Crash Site and Dawn Rider. The notice did not state why the production companies dropped the motion. Distributel president Mel Cohen said in an interview with The Wire Report on Monday that he does not know why Prima and Riding decided to drop the case, which has been ongoing since early this year. Cohen said he and many others will be watching for the outcome of a similar case involving Los Angeles-based Voltage Pictures LLC and small ISP TekSavvy Solutions Inc., to see what kind of precedent may be set. “That could be what everybody’s waiting to see,” Cohen said. “We will be reviewing that when it does come out. And I can also tell you if another case came to us in the interim, we would challenge that as well.” TekSavvy, like Distributel, has expressed concerns in court about Voltage's request for the identifying information for 2,215 TekSavvy customers whose IP addresses were linked to movie filesharing. The TekSavvy case was heard in a Toronto court in June and is currently awaiting a decision. Distributel—an independent Internet service provider (ISP) that offers services in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia—said in February that it wanted to “raise the bar” in the way copyright owners seek Internet subscriber information through the courts. The small ISP argued in court documents that a single IP address can be assigned to “multiple” customers over a long period of time and that they cannot be used to link specific customers to filesharing activities. “t is not analogous to a driver’s licence, a Social Insurance Number, or a fingerprint,” Distributel said. “On the contrary, an IP address can be used as a shared component to access the internet for multiple users.” Michael Wickstrom, Voltage’s manager of royalties, said in an interview with CKNW radio in Vancouver last year that illegal downloading costs a movie studio hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue for a single small-scale picture and millions of dollars for a blockbuster. He said he has been advised that, in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, an average of about two million illegal movie downloads happen each month. —With reporting by Nicholas Kyonka at nkyonka@thewirereport.ca and files from and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

NGN, Riding drop filesharing case against Distributel

News | November 4, 2013

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NGN, Riding drop filesharing case against Distributel

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