Supreme Court Denies Voltage Leave to Appeal, Ending the Reverse Class Action

The Supreme Court of Canada has dismissed, with costs, Voltage Pictures' application for leave to appeal the Federal Court of Appeal's decision in Voltage Pictures, LLC v. Salna, 2025 FCA 131. Yesterday's decision marks the end of the road for Voltage's decade-long attempt to certify a "reverse class proceeding" against Canadian Internet subscribers for alleged film sharing over BitTorrent, a novel procedure in which a plaintiff sues a single representative respondent on behalf of a class of thousands of respondents.

With leave denied, the Court of Appeal's July 2025 ruling stands: the certification motion is dismissed outright, without leave for Voltage to try again. The Court of Appeal held that a class proceeding was not the preferable procedure for these claims, because merely being the subscriber of an Internet account associated with an IP address does not establish that the subscriber infringed, or authorized infringement of, copyright — questions that would require individualized inquiries swamping any common issues. The Court also affirmed that the Copyright Act's notice-and-notice regime cannot be repurposed to serve litigation documents on class members, echoing arguments CIPPIC advanced as an intervener.

The result closes a file CIPPIC has worked on for over thirteen years. CIPPIC first intervened in Voltage litigation in early 2013, when Voltage sought an order compelling the ISP TekSavvy to disclose the identities of some 2,000 subscribers; the Federal Court's 2014 decision imposed safeguards designed to keep copyright trolling out of Canadian courts. When Voltage launched its proposed reverse class action against Robert Salna in 2016, CIPPIC remained involved throughout as certification was first denied in 2019 and the case travelled to the Federal Court of Appeal in 2021, back to the Federal Court in 2023, and up to the Court of Appeal once more in 2025. Along the way, CIPPIC also intervened in two related Voltage matters: Rogers Communications Inc. v. Voltage Pictures, LLC, 2018 SCC 38, where the Supreme Court confirmed that an account subscriber is not necessarily the person who infringed copyright, and Voltage Holdings, LLC v. Doe #1, 2023 FCA 194, where the Court of Appeal refused default judgment against subscribers on the same reasoning.