Why Copyright Trolling In Canada Doesn't Pay 98
An anonymous reader writes "In the aftermath of the Canadian
file sharing decision involving Voltage Pictures that includes
an order to disclose thousands of subscriber names, the big question
is what comes next. Michael Geist examines
the law and economics behind file sharing litigation in Canada
and concludes that copyright trolling doesn't pay as the economics
of suing thousands of Canadians for downloading a movie for personal
purposes is likely to lead to hundreds of thousands in losses for
rights holders."
Copyright C+Ds aren't "trolling" (Score:4, Interesting)
A studio enforcing their copyright against personal-use downloads might be a somewhat crappy and ill-advised practice, but it's not "trolling". To me if you were going to call something "copyright trolling" it would be more like using copyright letters to silence people, aka SLAPP, not using copyright the way it was intended, to prevent people other than the owner from making copies of the entire media as a substitute to buying it from the media holder.
don't canadians pay 'blank media tax' ? (Score:5, Interesting)
wasn't this to compensate media companies for data copying?
why pay a blank media tax and also restrict what they do online, re: copying?
look, if you start out assuming I'm guilty and force a penalty fee on me, I see no reason to not make the best of it and copy as much as I can, just to make USE of the money you forced out of me.
canada: you used to be cool. what happened?
Re:Better encourage rather than confront (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Better encourage rather than confront (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet the content companies act as though Netflix is Public Enemy #2 (right after pirates). They seem to think that putting their content on Netflix will kill their ability to make tons of money off of the content by selling it to customers multiple times. This might be true to an extent, but the more content they make available via Netflix (and other, similar services), the less incentive people have to pirate. Yes, there will always be people who pirate. You could offer movies in a DRM-Free format for $1 each and some people would insist on pirating it instead. My advice to the content companies would be to forget about those people. They aren't potential customers. However, the guy who wants to watch Game of Thrones online [theoatmeal.com], is willing to pay money for it, but finds that piracy is the easier (or only) option is a potential customer that you lose by not making your content readily available.