BMG Canada Inc. v. Doe, 2004 FC 488 aff'd 2005 FCA 193, is an important Canadian copyright law, file-sharing, and privacy case, where both the Federal Court of Canada and the Federal Court of Appeal refused to allow the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) and several major record labels to obtain the subscriber information of Internet service provider (ISP) customers alleged to have been infringing copyright.
CRIA made an application under the Rules of the Federal Court to compel 5 ISPs (Bell Canada, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications, Telus, and Vidéotron) to divulge the account information of 29 IP addresses that were believed to have downloaded approximately 1,000 copyrighted music files through the KaZaA and iMesh file-sharing software.
Justice Sexton, for the court, upheld the core finding of the previous case, that the identities should not be revealed to the plaintiffs.
He found that merely placing files in a shared directory does not constitute the "authorization" needed to infringe on the distribution right.
[5] He modified the test required in this kind of case and also said that, given the preliminary stage of the proceedings, the lower court should not have commented on whether the alleged file-sharing was actually copyright infringement.