Howard Knopf assesses the legal battle over the City of Toronto's use of the penny in an advertising campaign.
A Penny for Your Thoughts
October 9, 2007
Share this post
One Comment

Law Bytes
Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
byMichael Geist

June 22, 2026
Michael Geist
Search Results placeholder
Michael Geist on Substack
Recent Posts
Why Being Locked Out of Frontier AI is The Sovereignty Threat Canada Missed
Blocked Twice: How Bill C-34’s Kids’ Social Media Ban Would Compound the Online News Act’s Harm to Young Canadians’ News Access
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
The Data on Australia’s Social Media Ban: The Better the Privacy Protection, The Less Effective the Ban
Shaky Ground Gets Shakier: What the U.S. Supreme Court’s Location Data Decision Means for Bill C-22

Stupid
I\’m appalled that this sort of Americanized corporate copyright bullhockey has made its way into Canada, and from a crown corporation, no less.
There are three issues here:
1. How can you possibly copyright what is a proper noun used so frequently that it warrants being an improper one?
2. Crown corporations (basically, government) can own copyrights? Something is *seriously* wrong with that notion; it needs to be addressed and reformed.
3. Arguably, the government is using copyright as a cloak to suppress Torontonians\’ political freedom of speech. This is wrong on so many levels, from that government should *never* be able to assert copyright, to that they are lying about their true motives and that free speech is being oppressed (I hope I don\’t have to tell anyone what is wrong with that). I\’m disgusted that this is even able to occur in a democracy such as ours.