Are Quebec file sharers at risk?
p2pnet.net News:- Canadian Videotron customers sharing music through online p2p networks could find themselves in a particularly tight spot.
Videotron, with more than 430,000 Internet customers, supplies high-speed cable Internet access throughout Quebec by cable and dial-up modem.
It’s one of the five major Canadian ISPs being targetted by the Big Five music labels through through their CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) in a court case in which the CRIA is demanding the names of 29 people it claims are swapping unauthorised song files.
The case is being heard by Justice Konrad von Finckenstein who, because he wanted more information on the motion’s ‘technical requirements,’ and on how it would affect privacy legislation, adjourned until yesterday.
Now the hearing is again open, Big Music wants Telus, Shaw, Bell Sympatico, Rogers Communications and Videotron to hand over the identities of the 29 and is working to get von Finckenstein to issue an order which could force them to do so – whether they want to or not.
Videotron is the only company not opposing the CRIA, and that’s because its owner, Quebecor, is already on record as being alongside the music industry.
Last November Quebecor’s Archambault Group, a Quebecor Media subsidiary and the largest Quebec-based distributor and retailer of recorded music, came out with a radio, tv and newspaper “awareness” project “similar to the RIAA campaign” against p2p file sharing.
Archambault president Natalie Larivière appealed to other French Canadian music companies to join in, saying, “you have all heard of the legal effort by the Recording Industry Association of America. So far, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against high-volume pirates, the people who make massive libraries of stolen music available on the Internet.”
She also wanted “the worst offenders” to be “targeted on a regular basis, without advance warning. We won’t be able to go after all the millions of pirates but we think lawsuits without warning will be a deterrent.”
And in an amazing coincidence, she thought it would also be necessary to offer an alternative in the form of “a well-stocked catalogue”.
Quebec needed something along the lines of the “giant Microsoft,” Wal-Mart, iTunes and Canadian Puretracks online music services going, she said, “Otherwise, we will find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to convince English-language sites to carry our products.”
