Canadians Are Pirating So Much Music & Film That The Country Is On An Official Watch List
Who watches the watchers? 👀
The Pirate Bay torrent site.
Illegal consumption of music and movies remains rampant in Canada despite a torrent of costly lawsuits in recent years.
Nearly a quarter of the country stole content online in 2022, either ripping songs from YouTube or downloading files on peer-to-peer (P2P) sites, like The Pirate Bay.
A new report from International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which aims to protect U.S. copyrighted material, finds Canadians among the most active media pirates worldwide and is calling for offenders to walk the plank, or, at the very least, into a courtroom.
While Canada dodged placement on the IIPA "priority" watch list, reserved for the top 10 nations with the least regulation of pirated content, it did make the official top 20 watch list of countries having the most "adverse impact" on intellectual property south of the border.
"Government at all levels continues to allocate insufficient resources and strategic priority to enforcement of copyright laws, especially online, and significant market access barriers continue to impede U.S. film and TV producers and distributors," the IIPA wrote about Canada.
"The country has made some progress in shedding its reputation as an online piracy haven, but too many Canadian Internet businesses allow their services to be abused by pirate operators… It is nearly impossible to overstate the magnitude of the piracy problem in Canada," it continues.
The IIPA estimates financial loss as a result of Canadian piracy at around $1.5B per year and it's calling on the government to allocate more funds and dedicated specific teams to investigate piracy sites and copyright infringements.
It remains to be seen if the government will bite, or even whether the move by Netflix to crack down on password sharing will result in more casual streamers choosing the pirate's life.
