Canada's Federal Court has finally delivered a ruling: Voltage Pictures will have to pay $21,557 in order to expose 2,000 alleged infringers. The case involved the movie studio and the Canadian ISP Teksavvy, and this court ruling is very important for future “copyright trolling” efforts.

Voltage Pictures started to sue pirating BitTorrent users en mass in Canada a couple years ago. Before, the movie studio targeted tens of thousands of people in the United States, and now the copyright troll was planning to expose 2,000 subscribers of Canadian Internet service provider TekSavvy. The studio claimed that the Internet users violated the Copyright Act. The lawsuit resulted in objections from the Canadian regulator that demanded safeguards so the movie studio wouldn’t demand hefty fines from Internet users without oversight. In the meantime, the court allowed to expose subscribers. The only question was the costs associated with identifying the alleged infringers. The copyright troll believed these would only be a few hundred dollars, but the ISP asked for more than $350,000.

The Federal Court settled the costs at about $21,500, which includes $17,000 in technical administrative costs and $4,500 in legal fees. This makes it roughly $11 per each IP-address – it fact, this is just a tiny fraction of the thousands of dollars in settlements the movie studio usually demands from its victims.

Of course, this court ruling opens the door for more of these cases in the country. The only question is whether the costs and the restrictions make it worthwhile. However, the movie studio seems determined to continue its actions against the Internet users, claiming that the ruling just confirms the court’s commitment to facilitate anti-piracy and allow to pursue infringers