The New Zealand round of ACTA negotiations concluded earlier today with participants promising to release the draft text next week. This obviously represents a major new development that reflects the mounting global pressure for greater transparency that built in the weeks leading up to the negotiations. The joint statement also […]
Archive for April, 2010
Halifax Court Orders Newspaper to Name Anonymous Posters
The Canadian Press reports that a Halifax court has ordered a newspaper and Google to provide whatever information they have to help identify people who posted anonymous comments about Halifax's top firefighters.
Clement on Canadian Broadband
The Globe reports that Industry Minister Tony Clement has acknowledged that Canada's broadband leadership has "vanished."
U.S. Government Study: Counterfeiting and Piracy Data Unreliable
For several years, I have written about the lack of reliability of data on counterfeiting. The RCMP cited data without any factual basis, while other groups regularly made claims without support, such as reports from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and the Conference Board of Canada. Of course, this phenomenon was not limited to Canada. The US Patent and Trademark Office relied on the same data to claim 7 – 8 % of world trade is counterfeit, while a report from the first Global Congress on Counterfeiting, which led to ACTA, pointed to FBI data it said showed counterfeiting at US$200 – 250 billion per year.
This week a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office concludes that estimates such as these are not reliable and cannot be substantiated to a data source. The U.S. GAO was required by Congress to try to quantify the impact of counterfeit and pirated goods. While concluding that counterfeiting exists and is a problem, the GAO could not find reliable data. Its review of commonly cited claims:
Recent Posts
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 200: Colin Bennett on the EU’s Surprising Adequacy Finding on Canadian Privacy Law 
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
