Earlier this year, FairPlay Canada proposed to institute a national pirate site blocking scheme.

The coalition of copyright holders and major players in the telco industry, including Bell and Rogers, submitted its plan to the Canadian telecoms regulator CRTC, which subsequently asked the public for input.

This consultation triggered a wave of responses. Many ISPs and rightsholder groups were in favor, but there was also a big wave of opposition from academics, activists, and members of the public.

After a careful review, the CRTC today decided to deny FairPlay Canada’s pirate site blocking application. In its decision, the regulator explains that it lacks the jurisdiction to implement the proposed measures.

“The Commission determines that it does not have the jurisdiction under the Telecommunications Act to implement the FairPlay Coalition’s proposed website blocking regime to address copyright piracy and, consequently, it will not consider the merits of implementing the regime,” CRTC writes.

The FairPlay coalition argued that piracy brings serious harm to the Canadian entertainment industry. While the CRTC doesn’t deny this, it stresses that the Telecommunications Act is not meant to implement such copyright remedies.

“The Commission acknowledges that there is evidence that copyright piracy results in harm to the Canadian broadcasting system and to the economy in general,” CRTC writes.

“However, there are other avenues to examine the means of minimizing or addressing the impact of copyright piracy, including the ongoing parliamentary review of the Copyright Act and the expert panel review of the Telecommunications Act and the Broadcasting Act.”

This means that the controversial site blocking proposal is off the table for now. It’s certainly possible, however, that a revised version will be brought up again in the future.

Digital rights group OpenMedia, a fierce opponent of the plan, is happy with the outcome. Executive Director Laura Tribe describes it as a big win for the open Internet and a true demonstration of democracy in action.

“Today the CRTC protected the open Internet, in an important victory,” Tribe notes, adding that “all eyes will now turn to the Copyright Act Review, to see the final act of this play.”

At the time of writing the FairPlay Canada coalition itself has yet to comment on the decision through their official channels.

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Openload, one of the largest file-hosting sites on the Internet, is a thorn in the side of many copyright holders.

Content hosted on the site has served as a source for many pirate apps and sites. As a result, it recently earned a mention on United States Trade Representative list of “notorious” markets.

Today the site makes it onto another list, one that shows how much bandwidth the site is generating around the world.

The data come from Canadian broadband management company Sandvine, which just published its latest Global Internet Phenomena report. This provides an overview of which sites, applications, and protocols generate the most Internet traffic.

This list of traffic sources is dominated by video. Netflix is in the lead, with 14.97% of all downstream bandwidth, followed by the more generic HTTP Media Streaming (13.07%), and YouTube (11.35%). Overall, the video category is good for more than half of all bandwidth generated.

BitTorrent remains relevant too, especially on the upstream side. As we highlighted in a preview last week, torrent traffic is growing in some parts of the world, mostly due to piracy.

When zooming in on downstream-video bandwidth, Openload comes into the picture. Sandvine’s data shows that the file-hosting site generates 0.8% of all video traffic online.

That’s a massive amount of bandwidth, more than various legal streaming services such as Hulu or HBO Go use.

“One interesting appearance in the top 10 is Openload, which is #8 with 0.80% of video traffic worldwide ahead of services like Hulu, HBO Go, and BBC iPlayer with a service that likely will not make movie studios happy,” Sandvine writes.

This comparison is perhaps not entirely fair since, in contrast to the other services, Openload is available globally, but it clearly shows how much traffic a file-sharing site can generate.

There are significant differences in Openload’s ‘traffic share’ in various regions. Sandvine was kind enough to share some additional details that provide some further insight into this.

In the Asia Pacific region, 3.66% of all downstream traffic is credited to Openload, which makes it the 7th most used data source. In the EMEA and the Americas, the percentages are 0.79% and 0.39% respectively.

The massive interest in Openload and BitTorrent’s apparent comeback are signs that consumers still see the need to access entertainment through unofficial channels. According to Sandvine, the increased fragmentation of online video is one of the reasons. People don’t want to pay for a handful of subscription services.

“With more content choices and channels than ever before, consumers do not have good options to get access to all the content that may interest them and are still resorting to piracy,” Sandvine writes in its report.

While Openload is generally characterized as a piracy site, the site’s operators have rejected this notion. Instead, they point out that they have a DMCA-compatible takedown policy.

“We are offering several methods of taking down files according to the DMCA law, which is practically a standard in the whole world,” Openload previously said.

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Ever since his cloud storage site Megaupload was shut down in a blaze of publicity in 2012, Kim Dotcom has been fighting legal battles on several fronts.

One of those was aimed at forcing the government to hand over information relating to his case.

In 2015, Dotcom asked dozens of ministers and multiple government departments to “urgently” disclose information. Most of the entities receiving the requests transferred them to then-Attorney General Chris Finlayson. He denied the requests, describing them as vexatious and baseless.

Dotcom subsequently filed a complaint with the Human Rights Review Tribunal (HRRT), accusing the New Zealand Government of wrongfully withholding information. In March 2018, the Tribunal ruled in Dotcom’s favor, stating that the Crown was “in clear breach of its obligations under the Privacy Act.”

Dotcom was awarded NZ$60,000 in damages for “loss of dignity or injury to feelings” plus NZ$30,000 to compensate for the information not being handed over. However, the Crown quickly appealed the decision and in September the matter was heard before the High Court in Wellington.

In a decision published today, Dotcom was handed defeat after the High Court sided with the Attorney-General’s appeal.

“We find that there was a proper and lawful purpose for the transfer of the requests and that, because of the insistence that all 52 requests were required to be responded to urgently, on the ground that the information sought was relevant to the eligibility proceedings, they were vexatious,” ruling reads.

“Had we been required to determine the issues of remedies, we would have quashed the remedies ordered against those entities that were not defendants; set the awards of damages aside on the basis they were wholly erroneous and remitted the question of damages to the HRRT for determination in accordance with the principles outlined in this decision.”

In other words, the High Court ruling states that Dotcom should not have received the damages he was granted back in March.

“The damages awarded were wholly erroneous as there was no evidential basis for assuming that the information sought would have been relevant to the proceedings and there was no direct evidence relating to Mr Dotcom having suffered loss of dignity or injury to feelings such as to warrant an award..,” the Court notes.

True to form, Kim Dotcom received the news with defiance. This morning the serial entrepreneur slammed the decision as bad for New Zealanders.

“The High Court did not just ignore the law and parliaments intention. New law was made from the bench. This new law means Kiwis will have a harder time to access information they are legally entitled to. The Government will use this against Privacy Act requests it doesn’t like,” he said.

Shortly after the decision was published, Kim added to his earlier comments with an outburst on Twitter, suggesting that some judges in New Zealand are corrupt and care little about the law.

Let me break a tabu here. There are corrupt Judges in New Zealand. They don’t care about the law. They are not impartial. They do favors. They assist former associates or current friends. Relationships win cases, especially Government cases. All lawyers know this. Including mine.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 2, 2018

<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

Of course, like most decisions handed down against Dotcom, this one can be appealed. A short time ago the Megaupload founder confirmed that his team will be taking that option.

“We will obviously appeal today’s judgment from the Wellington High Court. It is ignorant of the law and parliament’s intention to provide citizens with access to information that the Government holds about them. A bad day for human rights in New Zealand. The fight goes on,” he concludes.

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The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada, and Mexico was negotiated more than 25 years ago.

Over the past quarter-century trade has changed drastically, especially online, and to accommodate these changes the three countries have been working hard to modernize the international deal.

A few weeks ago the US and Mexico reached consensus on many key issues and last night Canada came along, resulting in a new version of NAFTA. Titled the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the deal covers a wide variety of trade issues including various copyright related subjects.

“USMCA will give our workers, farmers, ranchers and businesses a high-standard trade agreement that will result in freer markets, fairer trade and robust economic growth in our region,” US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said in a joint statement.

One key change for Canada is that the country’s current copyright term will be extended by 20 years. At the moment copyrighted works are protected for the term of the author’s life, plus 50 years. This will be extended to life plus 70 years, at a minimum.

The Canadian Government has previously shown reluctance to make this change but gave in eventually.

Life +70 years

Another controversial subject that was widely debated by experts and stakeholders are ‘safe harbors.’ In the US, Internet services are shielded from copyright infringement liability under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, but in Mexico and Canada, that’s not the case.

The new USMCA includes a safe harbor section. This means that Internet services will be shielded from direct liability for copyright-infringing users. However, this protection doesn’t come without obligations.

The agreement specifies that ISPs should have legal incentives to work with ISPs to ensure that copyright infringements are properly dealt with.

This framework shall include “legal incentives for Internet Service Providers to cooperate with copyright owners to deter the unauthorized storage and transmission of copyrighted materials or, in the alternative, to take other action to deter the unauthorized storage and transmission of copyrighted materials,” the agreement reads.

ISPs that want to apply for safe harbor protection also have to take down pirated content and implement a repeat infringer policy, which the US already has. This means that ISPs will have to disconnect persistent pirates.

This is achieved by “adopting and reasonably implementing a policy that provides for termination in appropriate circumstances of the accounts of repeat infringers,” as the agreement prescribes.

Repeat infringer

The current text is quite vague and doesn’t define what the “appropriate circumstances” are to terminate accounts. This was also the case in the US, but after a series of lawsuits, ISPs have recently tightened their termination policies.

Crucially, the takedown and repeat infringer termination policies don’t apply to Canada. There is an annex to the agreement stating that when a country applies to various other conditions at the time of signing (including a notice and notice scheme), these do not apply.

It is clear, however, that the safe harbors will provide protection for ISPs against copyright claims. And with regard to the EU’s filtering plan, it’s worth noting that the agreement specifically states that “monitoring” or “affirmatively seeking facts indicating infringing activity” is not required.

At the time of writing the agreement has only been available for a few hours, but it’s expected that further analysis from experts will provide more context during the days to come.

While there is a final agreement, lawmakers in the three countries have yet to sign off on the new text, which isn’t a done deal yet. This means that, for now, the current NAFTA agreement remains in place.

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This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

The First Purge is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(1)	The First Purge	5.2 / trailer
2	(2)	Solo: A Star Wars Story	7.1 / trailer
3	(…)	Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation	6.3 / trailer
4	(5)	Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom	6.5 / trailer
5	(4)	Skyscraper	6.1 / trailer
6	(3)	Sicario: Day of the Soldado	7.3 / trailer
7	(…)	Hotel Artemis	6.2 / trailer
8	(…)	Hold The Dark	5.8 / trailer
9	(8)	Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Subbed HDRip)	8.1 / trailer
10	(7)	The Meg (Subbed HDRip)	6.0 / trailer

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