On July 9, 2008, in a major victory for the protection of copyright, the Québec Superior Court declared that file sharing through peer-to-peer websites violates the Copyright Act and is therefore illegal.
The court issued a permanent injunction ordering the site administrator of QuebecTorrent.com to terminate the site's operations. Justice Pierre Tessier declared that the site's administrators must refrain from using BitTorrent technology, peer-to-peer (P2P) or any other technology to allow or facilitate the reproduction of works protected by copyright.
QuebecTorrent.com had been subject to some thirty actions instituted by Québec music, film and television producers, whose works have been pirated on the site by means of the BitTorrent exchange protocol. Since 2006, this site of over 100,000 members allowed the exchange of over 2,700 terabytes of copyrighted material, or the equivalent of 580,000 films or 50 million music albums in MP3 format.
A Fasken Martineau team comprised of Julie Desrosiers, Jean-Philippe Mikus, Stéphane Gilker and Chloé Latulippe successfully represented the Association des producteurs de films et de television du Québec (APFTQ), the Association québécoise de l'industrie du disque du spectacle et de la vidéo (ADISQ) and The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA ) as well as many of their members in this lawsuit.