Hellboy fans take note: Canadian piracy police are taking names

Thousands of Canadians who pirated a copy of the movie Hellboy: The Crooked Man can no longer count on internet anonymity to download and share movies for free with impunity.

Hellboy Productions, Inc., has argued successfully in Federal Court that Cogeco Connexion Inc., a Canadian broadband business, must hand over the names associated with over 2,400 internet protocol (IP) addresses that allegedly infringed on the copyright of the 2024 movie depicting a fictional superhero and half-demon. Individuals can face thousands of dollars in penalties for doing just that.

The film production company wanted to identify the members of a group known collectively as the Doe defendants.

“I find that the interests of justice favour the disclosure of the information sought at this stage of the action after weighing the legitimate interests of (Hellboy Productions) in the ability to quickly and effectively enforce its asserted rights in the work against the legitimate privacy concerns of the persons sought to be identified,” Justice Allyson Whyte Nowak wrote in a recent decision out of Toronto.

The film production company alleges “that the Doe defendants have unlawfully offered to upload or stream the work and/or to unlawfully download the work utilizing the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) international network, which is a popular P2P ‘file sharing’ protocol which enables the decentralized distribution or streaming of movies over the internet between individual internet users.”

Whyte Nowak was satisfied that granting a Norwich order — which compels a third party not involved in the main dispute to disclose information only it holds — “is the only practical source of the information sought by (Hellboy Productions) and that the balancing of the public interests for and against disclosure of the information sought from Cogeco, favours disclosure.”

Hellboy Productions doesn’t just have a piracy problem with Cogeco customers.

“Separate orders shall be issued in respect of similar motions brought against Telus, Bell and Rogers,” said the judge.

“A still further set of orders shall be issued in respect of similar motions brought against Cogeco, Bell and Rogers in respect of a different movie, titled ‘Boy Kills World.'”

The judge was “satisfied that the Doe defendants were given fair warning of the possibility that their personal information could be disclosed by Cogeco.”

The broadband outfit “provided the Doe defendants with first and second notices from (Hellboy Productions’) counsel which asserted (its) copyright in the work and alleged infringement of the work by the Doe defendants. The first notice advised of Cogeco’s obligation to retain records that will allow for the identification of the Doe defendants and the second notice warned of the plaintiff’s ability to make a formal legal request to Cogeco to compel the Doe defendants’ identity.”

Hellboy Productions hired Thomas Nowak, the chief executive officer of Maverickeye UG, a forensic investigation company, “to track online piracy of its movies,” said the March 9 decision.