‘It’s time to get tough’ with movie downloaders, Voltage Pictures says

Los Angeles-based Voltage Pictures LLC will launch a broad legal campaign in Canada, the United States and United Kingdom in the next month or two to set an example and “get tough” with unauthorized movie downloaders, Michael Wickstrom, manager of royalties with the studio, said on a Vancouver radio show. “I believe this will be a successful campaign coming up,” Wickstrom said Tuesday on CKNW's Simi Sara radio show. He said people can expect to see developments on the campaign “within a month or two” that involve Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Voltage Pictures will be in the news headlines, he said. “We're very firm as far as going after illegal downloaders,” Wickstrom said on CKNW, referring to the success of a previous campaign in which the studio launched lawsuits related to more than 10,000 cases of the unauthorized filesharing of its film The Hurt Locker. The legal strategy of suing downloaders for copyright infringement typically involves settlements worth as much as a few thousand dollars each. Wickstrom said illegal downloading costs a movie studio hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue for a single small-scale picture and millions of dollars for a blockbuster. He said he has been advised that, in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, an average of about two million illegal movie downloads happen per month. Montreal copyright enforcement firm Canipre has collected forensic digital evidence on one million unauthorized BitTorrent transmissions of movies in Canada, firm spokesman Trevor Paetkau said in a phone interview with The Wire Report. Paetkau would not say whether Canipre is working with Voltage Pictures on potential legal actions, though The Wire Report confirmed that Canipre's collection of forensic evidence is being coordinated with firms in the United States and Europe. “They gather the information on behalf of their clients. What their clients do with it is really up to them,” Paetkau said of the evidence firm has collected. “I can't speak for the lawyers, the legal teams' strategies in the future here in Canada, or the studios' strategies.” Under the Copyright Act, as amended by Bill C-11 this year, a movie filesharer could be sued for “non-commercial” statutory damages ranging from $100 to $5,000 “with respect to all infringements involved in the proceedings.” Last year, Voltage Pictures won a court order from the Federal Court of Canada to obtain the names and addresses associated with 30 IP addresses involved in the transmission of The Hurt Locker on peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. For that case, Voltage hired Daniel Arheidt, a consultant with IPP Ltd. in Hamburg, Germany, to conduct the forensic investigation, The Wire Report reported at that time. On Nov. 19, 2012, Federal Court in Montreal issued an order to ISPs to disclose the names and addresses associated with 50 IP addresses alleged to have violated copyright related to content produced by Burnaby, B.C. studio NGN Prima Productions Inc., particularly its film Recoil. The Federal Court decision for NGN said the IP addresses were supplied in an affidavit of Barry Logan, who is managing director at Canipre. In a separate interview on CKNW's Simi Sara show Tuesday, which aired just before the interview with Voltage Pictures, Logan said Canipre has been retained by a number of companies to monitor peer-to-peer BitTorrent traffic and collect evidence. “We do monitor a significant number of file trading platforms globally, and we're interested, certainly, in what's going on here in Canada, and have been for some time,” Logan said. He said consumers should be aware whether they are watching illegally downloaded content, noting that people watching the new Twilight film or the new James Bond movie are watching productions not yet available on DVD. He said consumers see the movie studios as “fat cats, rich companies” when small, independent producers and studios are being harmed. Wickstrom acknowledged that the studios must be more proactive in the digital distribution of films because downloading has become too easy. “We need to be proactive now,” he said. “A new generation of infringers are thinking, 'Oh, this is just too easy. I don't want to go to my local Blockbuster, and it's too much work to just go to Netflix and pay the $7 per month.' They get trained into thinking this is normal, and it truly is not.” He said Voltage Picture's previous campaign in the United States was successful. “I believe that was very successful in setting an example, for the industry to say, 'We've had enough.' We're not going the way of the music industry. We're here to fight. It's time to get tough,” he said. Wickstrom told CKNW that, due to online piracy, studios are increasingly turning to less risky Hollywood film formats over indie and art films. “We have bank loans to pay off,” he said. “We want to become more aggressive as far as going after the infringers. I believe there is another proceeding occurring soon with Voltage, as far as Canada . It's truly time to set an example once more.” David Fewer, counsel with public interest group the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), told The Wire Report last year that he believes Voltage is pursuing a revenue strategy by extracting settlements from people involved in unauthorized file transmissions. Wickstrom said he believes the large studios are watching Voltage right now to see how its campaign plays out. “It's truly astounding that a small studio would be the first. One would assume that Warner or Sony or Universal would be doing this, but they're watching our example, apparently,” Wickstrom told CKNW. sdoyle@thewirereport.ca

‘It’s time to get tough’ with movie downloaders, Voltage Pictures says

Broadcast | November 29, 2012

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