Ottawa examines crackdown on pirated content
Posted April 14, 2021 10:17 pm.
Last Updated April 14, 2021 10:21 pm.
OTTAWA (NEWS 1130) — The federal government is considering giving Internet providers the power to block you from accessing pirated content.
The government has previously found about a quarter of us access pirated content and the owners of the rights to that material have pushed for stronger enforcement.
So the feds are opening up a consultation to take another look at this.
However, Laura Tribe with Internet consumer advocacy group OpenMedia has concerns.
“A bigger picture perspective, we don’t have a lot of choice in our internet service providers in Canada. So that’s really giving a ton of control into the hands of very few companies, in a way that we don’t have any mechanisms to make sure that powers isn’t abused,” she explains.
She adds allowing Internet providers to block our access to certain sites can go too far.
“I think one of the biggest concerns that we have is that there are going to be very valid sites that are blocked entirely because of either something very small on a certain section of the site that might be seen by your ISP to be problematic content — that all of a sudden the entire website or platform itself is now blocked.”
Tribe points out a previous attempt to allow blocking this material was met with major pushback from Canadians and ultimately failed.
“There are ways for them to have legal recourse but you need to balance that with making sure that there is due process in those kinds of claims.”
NEWS 1130 has contacted Shaw and Telus — the two major Internet providers in this market — for comment on the federal proposal.
