Film producer's suit pressing for IDs of illegal downloaders

A large-scale copyright infringement lawsuit currently under way in Toronto – reminiscent of similar multimillion-dollar suits south of the border – may have a hard time succeeding under new Canadian copyright law. But that doesn’t mean it won’t achieve at least one other objective: scaring off future illegal downloaders.
Voltage Pictures, the U.S. movie studio best known for the 2008 hit The Hurt Locker, is trying to convince a Federal Court judge to force Canadian Internet service provider Teksavvy to hand over the identities of more than 1,000 users. The users are tied to a number of IP addresses that the studio alleges were the source of illegal downloading of the company’s intellectual property on the popular Bit-torrent file-sharing platform.
If successful, it would be the largest such effort of its kind in Canada. In the last high-profile case, a record company tried to obtain the identities of just a few dozen alleged downloaders, but failed.
More from the Globe's technologu reporter Omar El Akkad