Bell launches new proceeding against pirate streamers

BCE Inc. has once more gone to the federal court seeking an injunction against a number of unidentified, John Doe pirate streamers. In a statement of claim filed with the court on Thursday, Bell wrote that it is seeking to protect its copyright over the exclusive rights in Canada to broadcast the upcoming FIFA World Cup, scheduled to take place in November and December. The the lawsuit seeks an injunction against two individuals, whose identities Bell does not know, but who use a particular series of IP addresses to operate pirate streaming services of Major League Soccer Games earlier this month. Because the services operated by these two individuals were streaming MLS games, Bell argued in the filing, they are likely to be streaming games from the World Cup. Bell also names other unidentified persons who also operate pirate streaming services they suspect will stream the World Cup, but whose sites use IP addresses that "change continuously." In previous instances where Bell has sought injunctions against anonymous pirate streamers, the injunction request were preludes to subsequent request for site blocking measures from the court. In the first case Bell, alongside Rogers Communications Inc. and Quebecor Inc., sought Canada's first ever blocking order against a pirate streamer known as GoldTV. The wholesale-based ISP TekSavvy Solutions Inc. fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which dismissed TekSavvy's appeal, ultimately establishing the judicial precedent for the imposition of site-blocking orders in Canada. In a separate case, Bell, Rogers, and Quebecor sought a so-called "dynamic" blocking order, in which the court ordered a number of ISPs to block a rolling list of IP addresses in real-time, as they are identified by the broadcasters as showing pirated National Hockey League games while those games are being broadcast throughout the NHL season. In the current case, Bell is seeking an injunction against a streamer that Bell alleges has offered pirate streams from Bell's TSN4 network on the domains s bingsport.xyz, papahd1.xyz and papahd.club using IP addresses with servers located in the British Virgin Islands and Ukraine. Links to the streams, Bell continued in the filing, appear on aggregator sites soccerstreamlinks.com, redditsoccerstream.org, and soccerstream.net. The second John Doe defendant in the suit uses servers that are based and hosted in Belize and appear on the same piracy aggregation websites. — Reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Jenna Cocullo at jcocullo@thewirereport.ca

Bell launches new proceeding against pirate streamers

Broadcast | September 16, 2022

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