Canipre, a Montreal-based intellectual property enforcement firm, is in trouble over a blog which appears to been involved with a copyright infringement for months.
Copyrightenforcement.ca is run by Barry Logan, Canipre’s Managing Director, Operations. In addition to posting releases from Canipre and information about the TekSavvy case, the site has posted dozens of full-text articles from media organisations around the world.
According to tech law expert Michael Geist the blog posted the full text of a 1,200 word article on TV piracy from the Wire Report, an Ottawa-based telecom publication.
This news piece sat behind a paywall limited to subscribers and is listed as “exclusive content” and was on display in an online locked filing cabinet with a sign up saying “beware of the leopard”.
Logan seems to think it is OK to repost full-text articles from other sources. In December, there were feature articles from the Huffington Post Canada, Business Insider, and Cnet.
They are not even attributed either. Some of the posts include articles that strip out reference to the author and others include no attribution whatsoever. Copyrightenforcement.ca also uses photos from the articles, often without attribution.
So what Canipre is doing is offering its services to media companies to detect piracy while running a blog which does exactly what it was bloggers banged up for, it seems.
Canipre runs an infringement-monitoring programme designed to take advantage of Canada’s new copyright notice-and-notice system. The release notes that the service detects online infringement and sends notifications alleging infringement to Canadian Internet providers, who must forward the notifications to their subscribers.
