Canada’s Federal Court makes unprecedented censorship order for ISPs to block IPTV si
Ran across this on reclaim the net. The ruling was handed down Nov15th. The 47 page ruling is available on reclaim’s web site. Here’s a bit of copy/paste.
Earlier in the year, a broad coalition of Canada's broadcasting and Internet Service Provider (ISP) giants asked a court in the country to allow the blocking of a pirate IPTV service GoldTV, including its domain names and IP addresses.
And for the first time in Canada's history, the county's Federal Court has ruled to order ISPs to block such sites, issuing an order to this effect. ISPs are told to block or attempt to block all domains, subdomains, IP addresses of the target website, and do this within 15 days.
The judge in the case did not think the decision would jeopardize either net neutrality or freedom of expression.
Censorship by ISP-level blocking has been increasingly used around the world as a tool to enforce copyright claims. Besides Canada, this practice has been all but normalized elsewhere, including in Australia, Germany, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Japan, and the UK, among other countries. It's Canada's first foray into the slippery slope of this type of internet censorship.
What makes Canada's Federal Court order remarkable is that it's the first of its kind. Canada's giant broadcasters that also operate as ISPs – Bell, Rogers, and Videotron – had been at the forefront of the push to obtain the court order to block GoldTV.
This will be interesting as to the future of iptv, at least in Canada.
