Voltage says Teksavvy overcharging for filesharing compliance

OTTAWA — Lawyers for Hollywood production company Voltage Pictures LLC told a Federal Court judge in Ottawa on Monday that Teksavvy Solutions Inc. is using a previous judgment to “claw back” more than $300,000 in legal and other fees, much of which it has no rights to, in a dispute over illegal filesharing. The hearing on costs comes after a February decision in which Teksavvy was ordered to hand over information on more than 2,200 subscribers who allegedly infringed on Voltage’s copyright by illegally downloading and sharing its films. Voltage won a similar case in 2011. Voltage requested the hearing in June after Teksavvy submitted documents asking for more than $300,000 in costs related to the handover of the information. Voltage lawyer James Zibarras told the court on Monday that Teksavvy is attempting to expand its costs to include many things beyond the simple matching of users’ IP addresses to their personal information. “None of these costs have anything to do with abiding by the order,” Zibarras said. He said the true cost is about $1 per request, or around $2,200 based on the user numbers that were being cited, though he never gave an overall figure. He pointed to costs that Teksavvy claimed for notifying users who may have been identified in the initial search, as well as costs claimed for an increase in phone calls to Teksavvy’s customer support line and communications materials the company sent out to all of its customers on the issue as examples of expenses for which Voltage was not liable. The notification was a voluntary move by Teksavvy, Zibarras said, and he said other efforts by the company amounted to “overkill” that was unnecessary to satisfy Voltage’s request. “If they want to overkill they can do so, they just can't charge for it,” he said. “They want you to require that we pay the costs of them acting unreasonably.” Nicholas McHaffie, representing Teksavvy, said the costs were justified by previous ruling in the case that gave the company the right to payment for “all reasonable costs.” He said Teksavvy is only involved in the case because Voltage had chosen it as an easier target than large ISPs such as BCE Inc. or Rogers Communications Inc., and that the company was an “innocent third party”in the case between Voltage and the file sharers. “This isn’t something that Teksavvy wanted,” McHaffie said. “It was Voltage's choice to focus on Teksavvy as subject of this motion.” Because the company was not participating of its own volition, he said, it should be fully compensated for the time and resources spent on responding to Voltage’s request. McHaffie said more than a dozen Teksavvy staff, including senior executives, worked long hours on the issue. Four senior operational staff, including chief operating officer Pierre Aube, spent an average of 180 hours each on the matter, he said. Without compensation this effort would represent an “undue expense” for Teksavvy, he said. Zibarras said that when you strip out the extra charges, the two companies aren’t that far apart when it comes to the actual “apples to apples” estimate of the cost of providing the information. “We just don’t think we should be paying for the apple, the banana and the pear,” he said. — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Voltage says Teksavvy overcharging for filesharing compliance

News | December 8, 2014

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Voltage says Teksavvy overcharging for filesharing compliance

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