Alyssa Quinn, policy program manager at Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), says website-blocking is the bluntest available instrument to use against online copyright infringement. CIRA is in charge of domain registry for .ca websites and was an intervenor in the case.
“Website blocking at the ISP level should be a remedy of absolute last resort,” she says. “There are other intermediaries closer to the actual infringing content that the plaintiffs could have gone to, in order to more precisely and proportionally deal with this particular case of copyright infringement.”
The issue in Teksavvy Solutions Inc. v. Bell Media Inc. arose in Nov. 2019. The Federal Court issued an interlocutory order requiring several Canadian internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to an unauthorized subscription service operating under the domain names goldtv.biz and goldtv.ca. Seeking the order was Bell Media Inc., Groupe TVA Inc. and Rogers Media Inc.
An ISP involved, Teksavvy, opposed the motion, arguing it should be up to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to block websites, not the Federal Court, and that the plaintiffs had not met the legal test for the order’s issuance.
A problem in the case was that Canada currently lacks an “explicit statutory framework” to use as guidance for website-blocking, says Quinn. The Court had to “do a bit of reading between the lines” of the Copyright Act and the Telecommunications Act to come to their decision, she says.
