Bell Media and several other plaintiffs filed an injunction on Sept. 15 against two individuals running multiple pirate streaming sites, in an effort to stop them from distributing infringing instances of FIFA World Cup Live Matches into Canada. They hope to stop the defendants from distributing FIFA World Cup Live Matches for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, which take place from November 20 to December 18, 2022.
The plaintiffs hold exclusive rights to distribute the programming to Canadian consumers. Because they appear to be based outside of the US and Canada, the defendants have been given 60 days to respond; just five days shy of the first FIFA broadcast dates.
According to evidence presented in the Injunction, captured on September 4, 2022, the defendants’ servers were accessible to the Canadian public through piracy domains including sportsway.me, redditsoccerstreams.org and reddit1.soccerstreams.net, bingsport.xyz, papahd1.xyz, papahd.club, and other domains.
The defendants have never been granted rights to distribute FIFA programming in Canada. The infringing streaming servers were said to be located in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Russia, and the UK, and the hosting providers were in BVI and Ukraine.
In addition to Bell Media, the other plaintiffs are CTV Specialty Television Enterprises Inc., The Sports Network Inc., and Le Reseau des Sports (RDS) Inc.
The case is T-1894-22, filed on September 15, 2022. It can be accessed via the Canada Federal Court web site
Why it matters
If successful, the case may pave the way for Canada to block access to these infringing sites.
