Last week I wrote about a federal court ruling that opened the door to copyright website blocking in Canada without Parliament establishing site blocking rules or the involvement of the CRTC. The decision is flawed from both a policy and legal perspective, substituting the views of one judge over Parliament’s judgment and relying on a foreign copyright case that was rendered under markedly different legal rules than those found in Canada. I concluded by noting that the case should be appealed and just over a week later, TekSavvy, the independent ISP that stood alone in contesting the blocking order, did just that. Even as the appeal was launched, however, the major Canadian ISPs began blocking access to the specific webpages identified in the court order.
Archive for November 26th, 2019

Law Bytes
Episode 278: Ben Waldman on Gander Social and the Challenges of Building a Sovereign Social Network
byMichael Geist

August 10, 2026
Michael Geist
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Michael Geist on Substack
Recent Posts
Nobody Can Say They Weren’t Warned: Canada’s Threat Assessments Predicted the Belleville Yom Kippur Attack
An AI Transparency Act for Canada: My Submission to the Government’s AI Transparency Consultation
Not If, But When: The Yom Kippur Terror Attack in Belleville
A Canary’s Song: What Antisemitism Reveals About the Health of Canadian Democracy
Elbows Up With Europe Too: Why Canada’s Pivot to the EU Raises the Same Digital Sovereignty Questions as the U.S.

