Judge sides with Bell in dispute over VMedia OTT service

VMedia Inc. is permanently prohibited from broadcasting BCE Inc.’s CTV channels on its over-the-top skinny basic service, an Ontario Superior Court judge ruled Tuesday. Judge Frederick Myers dismissed VMedia’s application asking the court to declare it wasn’t committing copyright infringement by making the CTV and CTV Two networks available for live-streaming for customers with Roku Inc. devices. In his reasons for judgment following a hearing held in Toronto on Thursday, Myers disagreed that VMedia’s new service, launched in September, is “the technological, functional equivalent of IPTV if not identical to it,” and that “therefore it should be treated as IPTV, fall under its BDU licenses, and be entitled to a compulsory license accordingly.” Myers wrote that it falls more in line with a service that can take advantage of the CRTC’s Exemption Order — which exempts broadcasting services delivered and accessed over the Internet — instead of under VMedia’s licence as a broadcast distribution undertaking (BDU). “I am called upon to decide if VMedia’s new service is broadcast lawfully only by reason of the Exemption Order. As the new service is delivered and accessed over the internet it does,” Myers wrote. “This is supported by the fact that VMedia’s new service does not meet factors for IPTV that the CRTC laid out in its 2015 decision that differentiated VMedia’s IPTV service from service delivered and accessed over the internet that is lawful only under the Exemption Order.” To that end, Myers sided with Bell's view that VMedia’s live-streaming of its channels didn’t qualify for protection under the section of the Copyright Act that is “only available to retransmitters who are not new media retransmitters.” As a preface to his decision, Myers noted that the court was not the forum for setting broadcasting policy. “The court will not determine whether particular technological innovations are good or bad or should be subject to or exempt from broadcasting or copyright regulation,” he wrote, adding that “if technology has overcome the existing laws and policies, it is open to interested parties to put the issues before the CRTC to try to revise the policies and the definitions discussed below.” VMedia stopped broadcasting Bell’s channels in October “as a sign of good faith” during the legal proceedings. In addition to declaring that VMedia infringed Bell’s copyright and prohibiting the company from doing “so on a permanent basis,” Myers also awarded Bell $150,000 in costs. “I do not think that the amount of Bell’s costs are outside the range of what VMedia ought to have reasonably expected given VMedia’s hardball tactics of launching the service in face of its own contract and such a clear legislative regime,” Myers wrote. — With reporting by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Judge sides with Bell in dispute over VMedia OTT service

Broadcast | November 22, 2016

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Judge sides with Bell in dispute over VMedia OTT service

Broadcast | November 22, 2016

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