Canadian Internet users are getting a taste of the P2P lawyering that had previously been confined to the US and UK, as Hurt Locker lawsuits have begun moving up to the Great White North. Three ISPs have already been ordered to disclose the identities of users accused of downloading the film, and if the ISPs decide to comply, there could be plenty more lawsuits.

As noted by University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, the producers behind Hurt Locker, Voltage Pictures, filed suit against a number of John and Jane Does in Quebec towards the end of August. The suit accuses the anonymous users of downloading, copying, and distributing the film via P2P networks—the users are only identified by IP address, and the Voltage Pictures maintains that the only way to proceed with the case is to obtain names and addresses from their ISPs.

On August 29, the Federal Court in Montréal issued an order to the three ISPs in question—Bell Canada, Cogeco Cable, and Videotron—giving them two weeks to cough up the identities of the users associated with those IPs. Those two weeks expire next Monday, September 12, and the ISPs have yet to give any sort of signal that they won't comply.

Voltage Pictures first began suing users in May of 2010 in the US for allegedly torrenting Hurt Locker—a case that started out with a massive 5,000 users, but quickly bloomed into a much larger (and precarious) monster of P2P lawsuits all over the country. Ever since then, the Washington D.C. District Court has been bombarded with letters claiming innocence, highlighting some of the major problems with using IP address to identify users.

Among other things, the accused have argued that their routers—identified by a single IP address—are used by numerous guests or simply that they don't even know how to download illegal music or movies. Though the claims are difficult to vet, it's clear that using an IP address in an attempt to pinpoint a single individual is problematic to say the least.

Geist pointed out that the prospect of thousands of P2P file sharing suits making their way to Canada makes him all the more grateful for Canada's Bill C-32. The copyright modernization bill makes the distinction between commercial and noncommercial infringers, and limits statutory damages on noncommercial infringers to a maximum of CAN$5,000 for all infringements. "This case confirms that mass lawsuits with the threat of thousands in liability is a real possibility in Canada and why changes to the law are needed," Geist wrote.