Copyright Notices Infringement – or Notice and Notice

THE COPYRIGHT ACT’S NOTICE AND NOTICE

The Copyright Act’s “Notice and Notice” provisions came into law on January 2, 2015.

 

What is Notice and Notice?

Notice and Notice is a simplified reference for the portions of the Copyright Act that require infringement notices issued by content owners to be forwarded to users.

The process involves a content owner sending an infringement notice to the user’s digital network provider, and the digital network provider forwarding that notice to the user.

The full details about Notice and Notice can be found on the Industry Canada’s website.

 

How does Notice and Notice work with regards to MSVU?

• Many content owners and/or their agents monitor the internet to see if their copyrighted works are being shared; one of the most common services monitored is BitTorrent. BitTorrent clients on your device download content but also allow others to download from your device, so in this situation you are actually distributing the content.

• A content owner or agent learns that their content has been copied, and through their tools they know what IP address was used to downloaded the content.

• The content owner then sends an infringement notice to the digital network provider of that IP address, in our case it usually goes to the technical contact on the MSVU domain, specifically Stuart.Chase@msvu.ca.

• A MSVU work ticket is created with the details of the copyright infringement notice.

• We lookup the IP address and associate it to the user that logged in at that time.

• An email is sent to the user with the details of the infringement notice and the expectation is that they will stop this behaviour.

• This ticket is closed on our side but remains as a record of the notice, forwarded email, and notification to the person believed to have made the copy of the copyrighted work.

 

Important notes about this process at MSVU

• Mount Saint Vincent University will not disclose the identity of the user to the content owner unless required to so by a court order or other legal process.

• Mount Saint Vincent University does not evaluate the legitimacy of the notices it receives. Mount Saint Vincent University is merely forwarding notices as required by law.

• If a digital network provider fails to forward the notice, it may be exposed to a significant financial penalty.

• The MSVU acceptable use policy can be read here Acceptable Use Policy – item three discusses copyrighted material.

• MSVU strongly recommends that if you have any copyrighted material on your device that you do not in fact have rights to, immediately stop sharing it and then remove the material.

• For assistance regarding alternative material to use in its place, or for more information about user rights under the Copyright Act, please email copyright@msvu.ca.

 

The top few lines of an example of the original message:

From: IP-Echelon Compliance <p2p@copyright.ip-echelon.com>

Sent: Monday, November 26, 2018 10:17 AM

To: Stuart Chase <stuart.chase@msvu.ca>

Subject: Notice of Claimed Infringement – Case ID be0ddc2941ce********

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–

Hash: SHA1

Notice ID: be0ddc2941ce***********

Notice Date: 2018-11-26T14:16:49Z

Mount Saint Vincent University

Dear Sir or Madam:

We are contacting you on behalf of Viacom International Inc. (Viacom). Under penalty of perjury, I assert that IP-Echelon Pty., Ltd., (IP-Echelon) is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive copyrights that are alleged to be infringed herein.

IP-Echelon has become aware that the below IP addresses have been using your service for distributing video files, which contain infringing video content that is exclusively owned by Viacom.