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By LegalMatters Staff • Online piracy includes copying, modifying, distributing or selling software or online content, including music movies, TV shows, games and software.
According to information from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) of Canada, 26 per cent of Canadian content consumers accessed pirated music, movies, TV shows, video games, e-books and/or software in 2021.
“Online piracy usually takes place on a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing platform,” says Ottawa criminal lawyer Céline Dostaler. “Peer-to-peer networks use a distributed architecture where each computer or device (called a peer) can share and exchange files with others without relying on a central server.”
She notes that while online piracy is not a charge in the Criminal Code, it is illegal under Canada’s Copyright Act. But the chances of being prosecuted are slim.
Dostaler points to a 2023 report from the U.S. International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which notes that police agencies in Canada “are unable to effectively deal with organized piracy and increasingly fail to follow up on detailed cases referred to them by rights holders.”
“The RCMP lacks the human and financial resources to properly investigate IP crimes or to prepare the cases for prosecution,” she says.
As the IIPA report notes, “It is nearly impossible to overstate the magnitude of the piracy problem in Canada … in 2022, 22.4 per cent of Canadians accessed pirate services.”
Dostaler says many people may not realize that illegal downloading comes with a risk, besides prosecution.
“Illicit streaming devices allow hackers access to your computer,” she says, citing the IIPA report. It notes that “46 per cent of the malicious content on content theft sites visited by Canadians is phishing, where fake sites defraud users to log their user name and password information, often redirecting users to legitimate websites afterwards.”
