The Industry Committee conducted its first hearing yesterday afternoon on Bill C-47, the Olympics marks bill (the second and likely final hearing goes this morning). With the exception of one Conservative MP who raised the prospect of whether the bill should include criminal provisions for ambush marketing, most of the […]
Archive for June, 2007
Engadget Reports Cable Co’s Actively Using Broadcast Flag
Engadget reports that some Canadian cable providers, particularly Rogers and Shaw, are activating the broadcast flag onto a questionable amount of content. The site says that "users who are trying to record said programming via their own Windows Vista Media Center setup are receiving all sorts of errors and messages […]
Multilingual Domain Name Delay A Barrier to Net Diversity
Appeared in the Toronto Star on June 4, 2007 as It's Time to Support a Multilingual Web Imagine if each time a Canadian Internet user entered an email or website address, they would be required to include a Chinese or Cyrillic character. For millions of non-English speakers around the world, […]
Is Telus Overreaching With YouTube Copyright Claims?
A blog reader points to a site listing more than a dozen videos posted on YouTube that Telus has demanded be removed due to copyright concerns. While there are several videos that may indeed be subject to Telus copyright, many others appear to merely involve union videos that surely do […]
Olympic Marks Bill on the Fast Track
Bill C-47, the government's Olympic marks legislation, has been quietly placed on the fast track. The very fast track. With no warning, the bill heads to committee this week with hearings today (Industry Canada, VANOC) and Tuesday (several Olympic athletes and committees, clause by clause). With clause-by-clause review already on the schedule, the Industry Committee will only conduct a limited review and the bill could head back to the full House of Commons for third and final reading by the end of the week.
I've posted several items about the bill, expressing concern about substantive shortcomings and legislative fairness. Given the government's determination to fast track this bill, the most that can be done is to suggest some modest reforms to the bill (dropping the bill is out of the question and major surgery is not permitted at this stage). With that in mind, the Committee should consider recommending at least two changes:
Recent Posts
Debating the Online Harms Act: Insights from Two Recent Panels on Bill C-63 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 199: Boris Bytensky on the Criminal Code Reforms in the Online Harms Act 
AI Spending is Not an AI Strategy: Why the Government’s Artificial Intelligence Plan Avoids the Hard Governance Questions 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 198: Richard Moon on the Return of the Section 13 Hate Speech Provision in the Online Harms Act 
Tweets Are Not Enough: Why Combatting Relentless Antisemitism in Canada Requires Real Leadership and Action
