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The whole process has become an expensive headache for a small company with 250,000 customers and about 500 employees, said Bram Abramson, TekSavvy’s chief legal and regulatory officer. The software system alone cost about $500,000 to set up, and the company has spent an additional $100,000 over the course of the past year to keep up with the notices.

“It’s a source of much frustration for us,” Abramson said. “It’s a whole system that had to be built. It’s not like you can buy that off the shelf.”

Accusing your customers of theft is also not great for business.

But under a law popularly known as notice-and-notice that went into effect in January 2015, ISPs such as TekSavvy are required to forward copyright infringement alerts to customers suspected of illegally downloading copyrighted material like movies, television shows and music.

Are there pirates in your neighbourhood? Anti-piracy firm Canipre, which represents several major Canadian film studios, collected about one million files on Canadians suspected of illegally sharing its clients’ work online in 2015. Here are the 99 neighbourhoods, classified by the first three digits of their postal codes, that had the most people pirating films and other material tracked by Canipre relative to their population. The numbers represent each neighbourhood’s share of piracy – for example, a neighbourhood with the number two has twice as many pirates than it would have if they were evenly distributed throughout the country. {"url":"https://postmedia.cartodb.com/viz/3243b96a-d1a8-11e5-8a4d-0e3a376473



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Copyright holders, of course, have enthusiastically participated, as the thousands of notices TekSavvy has to process daily demonstrate. And proponents say the requirement to forward notices to suspected pirates is reducing online copyright theft.

In May, a coalition of small film producers called the Internet Security Task Force called on the U.S. government to follow Canada’s model, citing data from anti-piracy firm CEG TEK that shows a dramatic reduction in piracy since notice-and-notice went into effect.

CEG TEK said illegal file sharing dropped by an average of 61 per cent in January among ISPs that consistently comply with the law compared to the same month a year earlier, based on an analysis of the data using fixed variables to compensate for the constantly changing catalogue of content it monitors. The company also found a correlation between how compliant an ISP is with the requirement to send infringement notices and how much piracy went down.