MICHAEL GEIST
Thursday, December 21, 2000
As my last column of 2000, I offer an A to Z review of this year in Canadian cyberlaw:
A is for the Alberta Securities Commission, which when faced with an offshore Web site called the World Stock Exchange adopted an aggressive stance on the question of Internet jurisdiction by exerting its regulatory might on the site's operators.
B is for broadcasters, who through the Canadian Association of Broadcasters lobbied for reform to the Copyright Act in the aftermath of the iCraveTV dispute.
C is for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which after years of discussion and planning completed the transfer of the dot-ca domain and liberalized the rules for Canadian domain name registrations. Canadians responded by doubling the number of dot-ca names in less than a week.
D is for is domain name hijacking, which effectively shut down web.net, a Canadian Internet service provider serving hundreds of non-profit organizations.
E is for e-cards.com, a Toronto on-line greeting cards site that found itself on the losing end of a $4-million (U.S.) judgment in California after rival ecards.com brought suit for unfair competition. The case was settled when e-cards.com agreed to surrender the domain name to its rival.
F is for Senator Sheila Finestone, who introduced the Canadian Charter of Privacy Rights in the Senate in an effort to extend privacy rights beyond commercial activities.
G is for Gnutella, the music-swapping Napster alternative. The battle over Napster, the dominant Internet law story of the year, fuelled debate over the law's ability to stop peer-to-peer file sharing and the role of alternatives such as Gnutella, Freenet and Scour.
H is for John Hastings, the Ontario MPP who introduced the E-commerce Act 2000. The move encouraged the provincial government to table its own e-commerce legislation, which took effect in October. Ontario was one of seven provinces and territories, including Saskatchewan, Manitoba, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Yukon, to introduce or pass e-commerce legislation in 2000.
I is for the Island Tel case, in which the Canadian Industrial Relations Board ruled that Canadian ISPs fall under federal regulation.
J is for JeanChretien.ca, one of the more controversial dot-ca domains registered in November when the registration rules were liberalized.
K is for Marcus Kuettner, owner of the Molson.com domain name. Molson sued Mr. Kuettner earlier this year, but a Canadian federal court refused to take possession of the domain while the legal issues were being sorted out.
L is for the Longitudinal Labour Force File Databank, the Human Resources and Development Canada database that contained data on more than 30 million Canadians. After the existence of the database was revealed by the federal privacy commissioner, the public outcry quickly forced the government to dismantle it.
M is for Mafiaboy, the handle of the Montreal teenager accused of shutting down some of the world's leading Web sites with a series of denial-of-service attacks in early 2000.
N is for Newbridge Networks, which obtained an Ontario court's permission to conduct electronic notice and voting procedures as part of its takeover by Alcatel.
O is for the International Olympic Committee, which accused hundreds of people, including many Canadians, of cybersquatting because they owned domain names that included the word olympics.
P is for privacy legislation, which received royal assent in Canada in April and is scheduled to take effect on New Years Day.
Q is for Quebec's draft e-commerce legislation, which strikes out on its own by veering from the Uniform Electronic Commerce Act, the Canadian model.
R is for Rockport Boat Line, which lost one of the year's most questionable domain name dispute decisions. The Thousand Islands boating company brought the action after river rival Gananoque Boat Line registered rockportboatline.com, only to lose when an arbitrator inexplicably held that the domain was not registered in bad faith.
S is for Showmax, a Canadian movie theatre company, which lost Canada's first lawsuit involving the framing of a Web page.
T is for Technodome.com, a Canadian theatre Web site that was hauled into U.S. courts when that country's anticybersquatting act was invoked against it.
U is for the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers' domain name dispute resolution system. It served as the model for the dot-ca dispute resolution policy that left Canadian grocery chain Loblaws burned on several occasions over domain disputes involving the term "presidents choice."
V is for Vale Printing, which found its domain name, http://www.wwcompanion.com ,challenged in an Alberta court by Weight Watchers.
W is for Wingen, the trademark at the heart of a dispute between tiny Waterloo, Ont.-based Pro-C Ltd. and giant Computer City. Pro-C won a controversial million-dollar award after Computer City was found to have infringed its trademark by advertising Wingen computers on its Web site.
X is for the anonymous people targeted in the Irwin Toy decision, a September case in Ontario in which the court outlined rules for the disclosure of the identity of people who post messages on-line.
Y is for the Yahoo France case, in which a French court asserted jurisdiction over Nazi memorabilia auctions on the Yahoo.com site, raising worldwide concerns over the limits of Internet jurisdiction.
Z is for Zero One Design, a Victoria-based design company, which found itself caught up in legal tussle with DirectTV when it began showing a DirectTV Japanese ad featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger on its Web site.
Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa Law School and director of e-commerce law at the law firm Goodmans LLP. His Web site is http://www.lawbytes.com.
mgeist@uottawa.ca
