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Multilingual Domain Name Delay a Barrier to Net Diversity

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) focuses on the delays associated with establishing multilingual domain names (often referred to as internationalized domain names).  Since their inception, domain names have been largely confined to ASCII text, based on a Roman character set used in the English language.  While this works well for people familiar with those characters, thousands of other language characters – from French accents to the Greek alphabet to Japanese Kanji – are not represented.  This creates a significant access barrier for non-English speakers, who are forced to use the Roman characters for most aspects of their Internet addressing.

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June 6, 2007 10 comments Columns

Olympic Marks Bill Amended to Protect Bloggers and Parody

The Industry Committee completed its short review of Bill C-47 this morning by approving several amendments to the bill.  These notably include amending the exceptions provision (which previously only referred to the use of the Olympic marks for criticism or in the publication or broadcast of a news report) in two important ways.  First, parody was added to the list, so that the use of the Olympic marks for parody purposes falls outside the Act.  Second, the bill now specifically refers to electronic media as enjoying the same exception as other forms of media. 

The importance of these amendments could extend far beyond this particular bill.  In the case of the parody exception, it arguably highlights a clear shortcoming in current Canadian law (parody is missing from the Copyright Act as well) – one that ought to be addressed in any future intellectual property reform package.  Moreover, providing specific protection for electronic media in this bill may open the door to similar media equality in other legal areas.

While the Committee added several other amendments (including a sunset clause for Schedule 3, which contains many generic words), the other notable occurrence was the submission of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada, a leading Canadian IP organization, and its Past-President Cynthia Rowden.  IPIC did the profession proud – as the only neutral, non-governmental witness to appear before the committee, it rightly criticized the bill for providing exceptional rights to one specific group. 

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June 5, 2007 Comments are Disabled News

Neutrality.ca Back Online

Canadians tracking the net neutrality debate will know that Neutrality.ca was taken offline about six weeks ago due to legal concerns.  I was deeply troubled by the loss of the site as I think it provided a valuable forum for a critically important issue.  Rather that allow the site to […]

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June 5, 2007 9 comments News

Industry Committee Hearing on Olympic Marks Bill

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 […]

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June 5, 2007 2 comments News

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 […]

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June 5, 2007 3 comments News