Reports indicate that thousands of Canadian BitTorrent users are receiving new waves of letters demanding cash settlements for movie piracy.

Why this controversial business model has been allowed to continue for more than two decades is no longer the big question. Eclipsing that by far is the inexplicable lack of awareness among otherwise savvy internet users who just keep feeding the trolls.

On an ordinary weekend roughly 6,000 days ago, news that so-called ‘copyright trolls’ had arrived in Britain came as a big surprise to the country’s file-sharers.

Aside from the well-publicized RIAA lawsuit campaign in the United States, in 2007 ‘trolling-as-a-business-model’ was considered a mostly German problem by the minority who’d even heard about it.

Despite thousands of international headlines over the next several years, the same ‘surprises’ replicated themselves across the EU, Australia, the United States, Brazil, and anywhere else where courts were prepared to accommodate actions against thousands of ISP subscribers.

Not Even Canadians Can Escape

Despite efforts to render internet subscribers less accessible and in theory, less lucrative targets, Canadians haven’t escaped the global industrial-scale settlement machine. Reports over the last few days suggest that things may be getting worse.

An RCI article published Friday mentions a lawsuit that lists more than 1,900 IP addresses allegedly linked to piracy of the Ryan Reynolds movie Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard.

The publication notes that opponents of these cases claim they monetize the “fear and uncertainty” associated with threats of being sued.

At this very moment one public torrent site has a 1.2TB torrent that is almost certainly being harvested for lawsuits, yet remarkably the peers keep on coming.
Kenneth Clark, a lawyer at Toronto-based law firm Aird Berlis which represents Hitman Two Productions Inc., has a theory that newer style download apps may be part of the problem. Where users previously used traditional streaming apps associated with a low risk of legal issues, apps that also share downloaded content with other pirates aren’t always advertised as such, leading users into a false sense of security. It’s hard to confirm, but it does sound plausible.

Deterrence vs. Profit

That neatly brings us to the stated aim of these lawsuits. Clark told CBC News what these and similar companies have said from the beginning; deterrence.

“There’s a lot of online piracy that people think have no consequences. Our mandate is to show people that illegal conduct has legal consequences,” Clark said.
While Clark’s mandate may indeed be just that, any deterrent effect is less than obvious, as evidenced by the constant flood of lawsuits and 15 years of deterrence that remains completely unknown to the people who matter. The more cynical of observers believe this is just part of a broader business model that monetizes infringement rather than simply succumbs to it.

In this controversial game, anything is possible but for those who follow it, new revelations are increasingly rare. Revelations apparently set to arrive later this week may put settlement models like these in a whole new light.