ShavaTV piracy pair found in contempt of Ontario court

Two people who had been allegedly selling subscriptions to pirated content under the name ShavaTV have been found in contempt of a court order telling them to knock it off. Imran Butt and Naeem Butt were ordered to stop pirating channels for their own TV service by an Ontario Superior Court justice in August 2018, granting the enforcement of an American court’s judgement against them, sought by Dish Network L.L.C., a satellite TV company from which the Butts were allegedly stealing content. According to a March 3 decision from judge Markus Koehnen, those companies included Dish, Al Jazeera Media Network, Asia TV USA Ltd., and several more, with the pirated content comprising a “significant” amount of Asian programming in various languages. The Butts had allegedly been pirating several companies’ channels for years and continued to do so after being ordered to stop by multiple courts, said the latest decision. After customers bought an “Android television set-top box” programmed to access ShavaTV, they would subscribe to the ShavaTV service and annually renew their access to over 50 channels belonging to other companies. According to Koehnen’s decision, the Butts have used multiple web domains to continue selling the boxes and subscriptions after being ordered to stop. Koehnen’s declaration that Imran and Naeem Butt were in contempt of the 2018 judgement states they admitted to their actions. The pair had previously tried to appeal the earlier judgement, but it was dismissed in May 2019. Despite their concession, the judge found them in contempt of court “for conduct that extends far more broadly than the conduct to which they have admitted.” Koehnen said private investigators hired by the other companies have accessed ShavaTV through boxes bought from the Butts on multiple occasions to confirm that channels were carried illegally. Naeem Butt’s own PayPal account processed the sale of more than 4,223 ShavaTV products and 4,756 subscription charges between August 2018 — when they were ordered by the Ontario court to comply with the judgement from the U.S. — and December 2020. That account was also linked to over 200 payments to various web-hosting companies, including companies that were used to stream the other providers’ channels illegally. The pair told Koehnen that they sold ShavaTV and related businesses in July 2018, but the judge said there was no proof. “One might think that, if confronted with contempt orders in the United States and a judgment in Canada, the Butts would at least want to paper a transaction that ostensibly relieved them of future liability under the judgments,” Koehnen wrote in the decision. The duo was given seven days from February 24 of this year (the last day during which Koehnen heard the complaints) to shut down ShavaTV per Koehnen’s decision if they wanted to clear their contempt. “Given past efforts by Imran and Naeem Butt to avoid their obligations under judgments of various courts, I strongly recommended that they err on the side of complying with whatever steps the plaintiffs require,” Koehnen wrote. This type of digital television piracy has become a hot-button issue in Canada: In November 2019, a federal court judge ordered several ISPs to block websites hosting pirate IPTV site Gold TV — the first time a Canadian court issued such an order. BCE Inc., Quebecor Inc.’s Groupe TVA, and Rogers Communications Inc. had asked for a court order that would force the ISPs to block GoldTV.ca and GoldTV.biz, which sold IPTV subscriptions to copyright-infringing live and on-demand TV content. TekSavvy Solutions Inc. opposed the request, as did others following an appeal by the company, which said that granting the blocking request would usurp the authority of the CRTC, and argued that site-blocking is “a draconian remedy that undercuts the legislative mandate of net neutrality.” TekSavvy's appeal is set to be heard by a federal court in a two-day hearing starting tomorrow. -Reporting by Hannah Daley at hdaley@thewirereport.ca and editing by Tim Forster at tforster@thewirereport.ca

ShavaTV piracy pair found in contempt of Ontario court

News | March 23, 2021

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ShavaTV piracy pair found in contempt of Ontario court

News | March 23, 2021

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