Tamir Israel, an intellectual property lawyer in the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), echoed these sentiments. “I would argue that there’s infringing sources and many non-infringing sources, but that’s seen as a threat if you’re trying to sell TV packages.” “Companies like Bell view alternative sources of access to streaming video as a significant competitive threat,” Michael Geist, an internet law professor at the University of Ottawa, told me over the phone. I combed court documents, spoke to Lackman, his lawyer, legal experts, and a lawyer representing the telecom and media companies suing Lackman in order to put together a full picture of what happened to TVAddons-and what it might mean for people and small companies operating in the margins of copyright law. All three have been lobbying the government in various capacities to set up a system for blocking access to piracy sites in Canada, similar to controversial measures undertaken in the UK. Now, Lackman is embroiled in expensive legal proceedings for a case that pits him against several telecom corporations and media companies, ultimately to answer: Was TVAddons a platform for innovative streaming apps, or was it designed to enable piracy?Īccording to legal experts, Lackman’s experience is an outgrowth of a new and hardcore approach to tackling piracy in Canada led by a handful of powerful companies-among them Rogers, Bell, and Quebecor, the parent company for TVA and Vidéotron. “This order just allowed them to go through everything my underwear, my socks. “They ransacked the place,” Lackman recalled when I interviewed him in his new Montreal apartment (the move was unconnected to the litigation, he said). He didn’t recognize the names, he told me, and said nothing. They presented him with a list of names of people suspected of being digital pirates in Canada and asked him to snitch.
Lackman, who called a lawyer in to represent him, was questioned for nine hours by the opposing counsel. The team copied laptops, hard drives, and any other devices they found, and demanded logins and passwords. The search was only supposed to go from 8 AM to 8 PM but it ended at midnight. The crew was there with a civil court order allowing them to search the place. Lackman was told that he was being sued for copyright infringement for operating TVAddons, a website that hosted user-created apps for streaming video over the internet. The other was there to be an independent observer on behalf of the court. One of the lawyers represented some of Canada’s most powerful telecommunications and media companies: Bell, Rogers, Vidéotron, and TVA. Seeing that he wasn’t about to be mugged, the police left.
When the police showed up after about 20 minutes, according to Lackman, he opened the door and was met by lawyers, a bailiff, and, rather ominously, a locksmith.
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