Canada Recording Cos Begin Fight Vs File Swappers
TORONTO (AP)--Court proceedings to sue those who share their music collections with millions around the world got underway in a Toronto courtroom Monday.
The Canadian Recording Industry Association asked a federal court for permission to smoke out music pirates from the protection of Internet Service Providers.
Mirroring action taken last year by the recording industry in the U.S., CRIA argued the country's five biggest Internet service providers should name people who upload a large number of music files.
"Our message is for all Canadians. You've got to go off the illegal sites and stop uploading music. Everyone recognizes this sort of distribution is illegal under Canadian law," Richard Pfohl, the lawyer representing the music industry, including the Canadian branches of Bertelsmann's (BRT.YY) BMG, EMI (EMI.LN), Time Warner (TWX), Virgin (VIRGY) and Vivendi Universal's (V) Universal unit, said outside court. "People have to realize there are consequences when you break the law in Canada."
After legal arguments by all the parties, Justice Konrad Finckenstein adjourned the proceedings until March 12. He asked each ISP to file more submissions about the technical requirements of connecting individuals by their numeric Internet protocol (commonly known as IP) address and how disclosing home addresses would affect privacy legislation.
Last week the music industry filed motions against 29 John and Jane Does who it alleges are high-volume music traders, storing thousands of MP3 files on their hard drives.
On Monday, CRIA started to work through the courts to learn the identities of those people, currently identifiable only through IP numbers and user handles.
It wants BCE Inc.'s (BCE) Bell Canada unit, Rogers Communications Inc.'s (RG) Rogers Cable unit, Quebecor Inc.'s (QBR.B.T) Videotron, Telus Corp. (TU) and Shaw Communications Inc. (SJR) to hand over names, home addresses and e-mails, currently protected by privacy laws.
Vancouver-based Telus said Monday identifying Internet surfers by their handles isn't simple. For example, said lawyer Joel Watson, one of the three names Telus has been asked to fork over didn't even have an account with the company during the alleged uploading infringement.
"It shows the frailty of the system," Watson said outside court.
Like recording industries around the world, Canada's has been battling a four-year slump in CD sales that it blames on the explosion of music file-sharing that first started when Napster surfaced in the late 1990s.
The Canadian industry claims it has lost more than C$425 million in retail sales of music since 1999 resulting in staff layoffs of about 20%.
Record companies were successful in suing Napster out of business in 2001, but have not had similar victories against more elusive and prolific successors, including Kazaa (KZA.YY) and Morpheus.
