The what now? They are not enforcing anything - the court is. They took the matter to court and essentially said "look, we have all reason to believe that person X has our property on their premises, we ask for permission to enter those premises to recover our property". And the court says "ok, but in order to make sure there is no funny business, I'm sending an independent lawyer and technical experts appointed by this court to accompany you". That sounds absolutely fine to me, no?
It's like if someone rented your car and didn't return it at the end of the rental period - that's not theft, or at least it would be hard to prove it as such, so at least right off the bat, it's not a criminal case. It's against the contract you two had though, and you would have to sue the rentee in civil court - and yes, the court would absolutely allow you to go to the yard where the car was kept, and recover it yourself - they would maybe send a bailiff with you, but not an actual police officer.
Is that "allowing private citizens/companies power to enforce laws"? Of course not.
1.) Running a website that allows other people to upload their own software for others to download is hardly comparable to stealing a rental car. He can hardly be said to have "had the claimant's property on his premises".
For comparison, Github takes an equally "laissez-faire approach to policing content on its site". Should the creators of Github be raided, questioned for 9 hours, passwords handed over, and the website taken offline, just because a user uploads something that a megacorp doesn't like?
2.) "I'm sending an independent lawyer and technical experts appointed by this court to accompany you" - they are actually appointed by the claimant, not the court.
1) and this brings us back to my original point - we can sit here and argue that the court should have never issued such order in the first place. But because it did, I want to see it carried out(or maybe let me put it this way - I don't want to see the power of search warrants neutered, just because courts sometimes misuse them. They are hugely helpful tool for law enforcement, and we should definitely work against courts issuing them frivolously or under pressure from corporations).
2) Quoting from the article: "One of the lawyers represented some of Canada’s most powerful telecommunications and media companies: Bell, Rogers, Vidéotron, and TVA. The other was there to be an independent observer on behalf of the court."
Even if the car example was valid, which I'd argue against, and even if the company itself would be allowed to go onto your property to obtain that car, which I'm not sure that actually can, the comparison would still be invalid.
The search isn't limited to just the data which that say you have stolen, but are allowed to basically get copies of anything digital you own, even things which have nothing to do with the matter at hand. Medical documents? Well, the hard drive they are on could contain stolen data, so they can copy the entire harddrive. Confidential data of clients you have? Same thing.
This is the big problem as I see it. Not normally would pictures of your family be taken in evidence for an unrelated crime, to be gone over later by some unseen third party.
Here they just hoover up everything and once it's out the door you don't know what happens to it or who's looking at it.
It seems to me like these companies were able to use a legal form of intimidation to shut down someone offering a competing technology platform.
Even if they didn't do that, what happens when you share your house with one or more room mates? Are all of you electronics and your social media accounts, or even worse, bank accounts, in danger, because, well 'someone in this house is suspect of doing a boo boo, so we're confiscating everything'?
While I agree that it should be done by law enforcement, the court order already requires that a lawyer with no connection to the case should be present, as well as court appointed technical experts. I think that's a pretty strong protection.
