Not for long, though.
Chair, thank you, and welcome to our members here today.
I would also like to thank the witnesses. Their remarks are very interesting
and I am very interested in pursuing them.
Mr. Reckziegel, the last comment you made was with respect to BitTorrents. I want to get right into this, because it seems this is an area in which the committee is going to have to drill a lot deeper. I know there are a lot of discussions out there, but perhaps I'd go to Ms. Noss first.
The Pirate Bay, which is the world's largest peer-to-peer file sharing torrent, had 2.5 million--if my resources are correct here--registered users in 2008. It's also made an incredible $4 million just from advertising its site alone. They lost an appeal, as some of you know, on conviction in Sweden. The court described it as follows, and I'm quoting here: “The Pirate Bay has facilitated illegal file sharing in a way that results in criminal liability for those who run the service.”
This service, as you know, is not just exclusive to Sweden or other countries. It's also here in Canada. I believe isoHunt in particular, which operates out of British Columbia, is the third most popular infringing BitTorrent site in the world. It continues to operate with more than 40 million peers and over 6.7 million active torrents. These figures are from their own website just a couple of weeks ago, on January 31, 2011. I just want to be absolutely clear that I'm not picking these numbers out of the sky.
Ms. Noss, in your opinion, how would Bill C-32 be able to prevent, stop, and arrest sites like isoHunt from facilitating the mass distribution of unauthorized copies of works, if at all?