Canada's record labels aren't giving up the fight to find out the identities of 29 people suspected of uploading vast amounts of music files. On Wednesday, the Canadian Recording Industry Association began an appeal hoping to overturn an earlier decision denying them the information.

The accused are charged with uploading files; that is taking official store bought recordings and making them available online for file sharing. It is these people who are in the crosshairs, and not the casual user who will download a file from time to time.

If the identities of the 29 suspects are revealed, Canada's recording industry could sue them to recoup money lost to free peer-to-peer downloading networks like Kazaa or LimeWire.
The three judges hearing the panel want the CRIA to prove the lower court judge made a mistake in interpreting Canada's copyright laws.

Last year, Justice Konrad von Finckenstein said he wasn't convinced with evidence linking network pseudonyms to specific IP addresses.

The evidence came from New York-based anti-piracy company MediaSentry. They used screen grabs showing a list of songs in a shared folder. But Internet service providers countered MediaSentry's evidence, saying IP addresses couldn't always be linked to a single computer.

Von Finckenstein sided with the service providers, saying, "It would be irresponsible for the court to order the disclosure of the name of the account holder of IP address 24.84.179.98 and expose this individual to a lawsuit by the plaintiffs."

"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings," the judge wrote. "They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories."

David Fewer, a lawyer representing the general public at the trial, says the big legal issue here is finding out how strong the evidence against a suspected copyright infringer has to be before their online privacy rights are overridden.

"This hearing is all about the test that the court will apply whenever somebody comes to it alleging copyright infringement," he says.

Meanwhile, Bell Canada, Shaw Communications, Telus Communications and Rogers Cable are fighting the CRIA's request to reveal the identities of suspected infringers. They say Canada's privacy laws prevent them from doing so unless there's a court order.

But Videotron has agreed to comply, saying its owner, Quebecor, is concerned about piracy in other parts of its business including television, newspapers and CDs.

iTunes is the leading vendor for legal file sharing, and they sell approximately one million songs per month at $0.99 a piece. But that pales in comparison to the 134 million songs downloaded illegally every month.
The film and television sectors are not part of the current case, but are watching the legal proceedings with interest. The future of their industries hangs in the balance too.

With files from the Canadian Press