As the last few remaining NHL teams battle their way towards the Stanley Cup finals, the Federal Court has ordered nadian ISPs to begin blocking NHL game streams accused of violating copyright Friday. While nadian courts have previously recognized the availability of static website blocking (despite CIPPIC's objection), this order is the first of its kind in nada, as we argued in our intervention. It implements a sophistited system that relies on a private company to identify allegedly unauthorized streams using automated assessment tools and report these to nadian ISPs for real-time blocking, and represents the next step and the never-ending expansion of remedies demanded by copyright holders in nada.
The order adopts a number of safeguards. It will only operate during the remainder of the playoffs, where there are fewer games to monitor and less opportunities for over-blocking. The Court also ordered an independent expert to audit the website blocking initiative. The independent audit will provide critil evidence that will be critil when courts are later asked to extend this remedy. Specifilly, if Rogers, Bell, and the other media companies who applied for this order wish to extend its applition beyond the 2022 playoff season, the independent audit will need to establish that collateral blocking of legitimate content was minimal and that the blocking was effective in actually increasing legitimate subscriptions rather than simply driving customers to other forms of infringement or adoption of VPN services.
Image source: Stanislav Lvovsky, "Censored", carane njaluk free Kripik 2b, September 28, 2015, CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
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