By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – The three groups granted intervenor status in the appeal of the country’s first website-blocking court order involving alleged pirate IPTV service provider Gold TV have submitted their final arguments this week.
The Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), and a consortium of publishers and sports organizations have all filed their arguments in Federal Court.
In June, the court allowed the intervenors to submit arguments on the condition that they be grouped together according to the unique arguments they will present. The result is three groups representing 16 parties will argue either for or against site-blocking, which was appealed by TekSavvy last fall.
No hearing date has been set yet.
As such, CIPPIC and CIRA will argue that the website-blocking order interferes with the balanced approach legislators arrived at when they modernized the copyright regime; telecommunications law limits the power to order site-blocking; and international treaties don’t bind Canada to blocking.
The BCCLA will focus on how the blocking order limits freedom of expression by barring GoldTV from providing material on the internet and restricting the public from seeing it. The rights group argues that the lower court failed to consider freedom of expression when it made the blocking order and asks it to consider whether the order is adequately limited and whether it captures legal content being blocked.
Finally, the publishers and sports organizations will argue that blocking orders enforced against internet service providers “are one of the only means available to disrupt these and other illegal business models.” The group will cite 42 countries that have instituted blocking orders against ISPs. The consortium will argue that blocking orders are consistent with international treaty obligations, and may in fact be required under them; that the Copyright Act allows room for blocking while maintaining balance between rightsholders and users; and net neutrality and freedom of expression principles are not infringed by the order.
The group consists of the Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films (FIAPF), the Canadian Music Publishers Association (CMPA), International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP), Music Canada, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the International Publishers Association (IPA), International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), American Association of Publishers (AAP), the Publishers Association Ltd. (PA), Canadian Publishers’ Council (CPC), Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP), the Premier League, and DAZN.
The Premier League is no stranger to legal action against alleged content thieves. The soccer league has already gone to court in the United Kingdom and obtained orders to block livestreams of their matches on third-party add-ons for Kodi set-top box devices. That kind of order was first obtained by the league in 2017.
The GoldTV order, which was granted in November, does not block livestreams – it only applies to websites under the infringer’s name that sought to allegedly sell unlicensed content.
