$29M Statutory Damage Award For Copyright Infringement Includes Finding Of "Inducement"

It is settled law in Canada that one who induces another to infringe a patent is guilty of patent infringement. ¹ But what about other intellectual property rights? On a recent ex parte  default judgment motion in the Federal Court of Canada, the Court awarded over $29M in statutory damages for a claim of copyright infringement brought by a group of media broadcasters against sellers of pre-programmed set-top boxes for streaming alleged pirated content. While the Court found the Defendants had infringed the Plaintiffs' statutory rights under the Copyright Act, including the right to communicate a work to the public by telecommunication (ss. 3(1)(f)) and the making available right (s. 2.4(1.1)), as well as authorizing such acts without consent, it also found as a separate cause of action that the Defendants knowingly induced copyright infringement. The finding is notable given the paucity of Canadian authority relating to inducing copyright infringement, and what may