Columns

Canadian Online Learning Company Hit With Patent Suit

A Waterloo, Ontario company spends years developing new technologies that leverage the power of the Internet. It develops a global following. Then, seemingly out of the blue, it is hit with a patent infringement suit by a U.S. company, instantly facing the prospect of years of costly litigation in U.S. courts. With limited resources, it must defend itself by arguing that the patents are invalid.

So begins my weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC International version, homepage version) which does not discuss the RIM-NTP patent suit but rather the recent patent lawsuit launched by Blackboard, a learning management system company, against Desire2Learn, a Canadian competitor. Both the patent and the lawsuit have generated enormous anger within the academic and open source software communities.

August 14, 2006 — 4 comments — Columns

Canadian Libel Law Raises Net Free Speech Chill

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC international version, homepage version) places the spotlight on this week’s fundraiser in support of P2Pnet.net, a British Columbia-based website that is being sued for defamation for comments posted on the site by its readers. The importance of the Internet intermediary liabilty issue extends well beyond just Internet service providers – corporate websites that allow for user feedback, education websites featuring chatrooms, or even individual bloggers who permit comments face the prospect of demands to remove content that is alleged to violate the law.

The difficult question is not whether these sites and services have the right to voluntarily remove offending content if they so choose – no one doubts that they do – but rather whether sites can be compelled to remove allegedly unlawful or infringing content under threat of potential legal liability. The answer is not as straightforward as one might expect since Canadian law varies depending on the type of content or the nature of the allegations.

July 31, 2006 — 4 comments — Columns

The Canadian Long Tail

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version), analyzes of the application of the Long Tail, now a popular book, to Canadian cultural industries including book publishing, music, and movies. From a Canadian perspective, the importance of the Long Tail should resonate strongly with businesses and policy makers […]

July 24, 2006 — 1 comment — Columns

The Mentos Video

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC version, homepage version) examines the enormous success of a video mixing Diet Coke and Mentos (which through a quirk of chemistry, sparks an immediate chemical reaction – a beverage geyser spurting several metres into the sky). Released for free on […]

July 17, 2006 — Comments are Disabled — Columns

Rethinking the Public in Public Broadcasting

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) assesses potential reform of the CBC. Canadian stories are being told in record numbers, yet they are not found on the CBC. The blossoming of citizen journalism, blogging, digital photo-sharing, and user-generated content is reshaping the way the public is informed and entertained. Millions of Canadians are no longer merely consumers of the news and entertainment. Instead, they are active participants – one expert recently labeled them as "the people formerly known as the audience" – who create, report, comment, and analyze their own content that vies for the attention of a global audience.

The CBC’s future may therefore lie in further blurring the difference between conventional broadcast and the Internet by establishing an integrated approach that brings more broadcast content to the Internet and more Internet content to broadcast. The CBC has developed an impressive online presence, yet the majority of the content is based on the traditional broadcast model that places a premium on control. The next-generation CBC would do well to partner with the public by loosening restrictions and encouraging the dissemination of Canadian content from a broader range of sources.

Indeed, public broadcasters in other countries have already begun to reinvent themselves in this way.

July 10, 2006 — 6 comments — Columns