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Kirwan on Phishing

Mary Kirwan has an interesting column at the Globe focusing on phishing. She suggests that "the problem is simply under-reported in Canada, and that the tight-knit banking community is keeping mum about the issue."

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November 16, 2006 Comments are Disabled News

UK PM Launches E-Petitions

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has launched a new electronic petition service that allows citizens to create and sign petitions directly on the Prime Minister's website.  Within two days of the launch, there are several petitions online.  The most popular?  Hundreds have signed onto a petition focused on copyright with […]

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November 15, 2006 Comments are Disabled News

The Free Market Champion

The Globe and Mail features two major articles today that involve Industry Minister Maxime Bernier which demonstrate that current choices are all about politics, not principles.  The first indicates that Bernier plans to scuttle the CRTC's revised VoIP decision, the "first time in years a Minister intervened to overrule a […]

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November 15, 2006 Comments are Disabled News

Copyright Notices

Today two books – a travel guide from Frommer's and Paul Wells' Right Side Up – arrived from Indigo in my mailbox.  I'm looking forward to both books – the travel guide will be useful for an upcoming trip and I enjoy Wells' blog and his Macleans review of the last election was terrific.  As I flipped to the opening page of the Wells book, I was struck by the copyright notice (yes, I know that only a law professor would actually be struck by a copyright notice).  It states:

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

I recognize that few people actually read these notices and that most would consider this standard. Yet there is something wrong about Canadian publishers (in this case McClelland & Stewart's Douglas Gibson imprint) using legal notices that are exceptionally misleading and which perpetuate the incorrect view that nothing may be copied without prior permission. 

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November 14, 2006 8 comments News

Oda Funding Controversy May Derail Broadcast and Copyright Policy

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) takes stock of the brewing controversy over Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda's fundraising activities. With the Hill Times running a lead story on her 2005 fundraiser and persistent questions in the House of Commons, it is becoming apparent that this issue is quickly becoming a liability for the Conservative government.  While last week's discussion focused on the now-cancelled Oda fundraiser sponsored by a CanWest lobbyist and a 2005 Corus-hosted fundraiser, further investigation into Oda's past campaign financing demonstrates that the close ties between Oda and industry lobbyists may run deeper than even Angus realized.   

According to Elections Canada data, Oda held a similar fundraiser in May 2004 – before she was even elected to the House of Commons – that attracted enormous corporate support from the broadcast industry including Alliance Atlantis, Astral, CanWest, and CHUM, as well as from more than a dozen senior executives from major broadcast and cable companies.

Once elected, the support continued.  

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November 13, 2006 5 comments Columns