What Happens When Telecom Companies Search Your Home For Piracy

ted_pikul writes:
Adam Lackman ran TVAddons, a site hosting unofficial addons for Kodi media center. Last year, a legal team representing some of Canada's most powerful telecom and media companies raided his home with a court order -- they searched his apartment, copying hard drives and devices, took his laptop, and shut down his website and Twitter account [which had 100,000 followers]. Now, he's being sued for piracy and sinking deep into debt as he fights to make it to trial.
From Motherboard:
Lackman did not have to let anybody into his home that morning. But it presented a legal catch-22: if he hadn't, he would be in breach of a court order and could have been subjected to fines or imprisonment. 'In high school you learn that if someone doesn't have a warrant, you don't let them into your house,' Lackman told me. 'I didn't know there was this whole other law where big companies can spend money [on lawyers] and do whatever they want'....
Shortly after the search, a federal judge ruled the search unlawful in a procedural hearing. The questioning was an 'interrogation,' the judge said, without the safeguards normally afforded to defendants, and presenting Lackman with a list of names to snitch on was 'egregious.' The plaintiffs also did not make a strong enough case that TVAddons was solely intended to enable piracy, the judge decided... The plaintiffs appealed this decision, and in February a panel of three judges -- this time in the federal court of appeals -- overturned the previous decision in its entirety. The search was lawful and conducted within legal parameters, the judges agreed. The list of names was only presented to Lackman to 'expedite the questioning process,' and 'despite a few objectionable questions' the nine-hour question period was not an interrogation, the panel ruled....
Everything that's happened to him so far has occured before a trial where he can argue the facts of how TVAddons operated, and yet the judge who approved the search order and the judge who upheld it on appeal have already effectively ruled that his website was designed to facilitate piracy....

Lackman has already been ordered to pay $55,000 for the legal fees of the companies suing him, according to the article, and he's 'already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to his own legal team...
'[I]n the new Canadian anti-piracy regime led by powerful companies, just being accused of enabling piracy can come with immense personal consequences even before your day in court.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.