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Smartphone with ChatGPT app by Jernej Furman from Slovenia, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

From CCH to ChatGPT: How Canadian Copyright Law Played the Key Role in Deciding a Leading AI Training Data Case in India

The Delhi High Court has released what may be one of the most consequential copyright decisions yet on artificial intelligence, ruling in ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. OpenAI that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted news articles to train the models behind ChatGPT is prima facie fair dealing. The 135-page decision of Justice Amit Bansal, released last week, dismissed an Indian news agency’s application for an interim injunction, and while it is expressly not a final ruling on the merits, it features valuable analysis of the copyright implications of machine research, market harm and the public interest. The case is particularly notable from a Canadian perspective since it is the 2004 landmark CCH Supreme Court of Canada copyright case that provides the decision’s fair dealing foundation.

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July 30, 2026 0 comments News
Restart by Michael Callachan https://flic.kr/p/akGZdU CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Starting Over: Court Filing Confirms the CRTC’s Streamer Contribution Decisions Are Dead With a Full Online Streaming Act Reset to Come

When the government announced plans last month to kill the CRTC’s Online Streaming Act ruling, it left a critical question unanswered: was the target only the Commission’s decision to increase streamer contributions to 15 percent, or did the reversal extend to the original base contribution decision requiring foreign streamers to contribute five percent of their Canadian revenues? A new court filing confirms it is both. In a letter to the Federal Court of Appeal dated July 17, 2026, first reported by the Wire Report, Department of Justice Senior General Counsel Michael Morris advised the court that “the Government’s intention is to eliminate the base contribution requirement on streaming services and to provide government funding to replace those contributions.” The entire contribution framework the CRTC has built since 2024 is therefore dead, with taxpayers covering the costs while the government develops a replacement.

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July 29, 2026 5 comments News
A black and white photo of a broken window Creative Commons CC0 1.0 https://picryl.com/media/broken-glass-window-446551

The Name on the Window Was Enough: The Attacks on Kiva’s and the Normalization of Antisemitic Violence in Canada

Kiva’s, the well-known Toronto Jewish bakery, was struck by gunfire and smashed windows in two locations over the weekend. This one is personal as Kiva was my grandmother’s cousin. Both were Holocaust survivors who rebuilt their lives in Toronto, and though he sold the business years ago, the owners have kept his name on the window ever since. Whoever fired at that window almost certainly knew none of this, since for those responsible the Jewish name on the storefront was evidently reason enough.

For me, the sense that the violence keeps landing close to home is not new. The Pride of Israel synagogue, where I grew up and where my parents have been members for decades, was vandalized in 2024, and last summer an elderly Jewish woman was stabbed in a hate-motivated attack at my local Ottawa grocery store, a Loblaws known for carrying the city’s largest selection of kosher food. The attack on Kiva’s makes three incidents with a direct personal connection, which might seem like a remarkable string of bad luck were it not for the reality that the volume of antisemitic violence in Canada now ensures that many Jewish Canadians can tell a similar story about their synagogue, their school, their grocery store, or their family. For anyone wondering why so many Canadian Jews describe feeling vulnerable and unsafe, that is the answer.

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July 28, 2026 11 comments News
From Hanoi to Universalization Accelerating Signature and Ratification of the UN Convention Against Cybercrime by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime CC BY 4.0 https://flic.kr/p/2sgnak8

The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 277: Kate Robertson on the Risks That Lie Behind Canada’s Unexpected Signing of the UN Cybercrime Convention

The Canadian government’s surprise decision to sign the UN Cybercrime Convention has sparked many questions about the convention, its risks, and what changed over the past nine months between Canada no-showing the signing in Vietnam and this month’s reversal. To help answer those questions, there is no one better than Kate Robertson, a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab, who has been vocal on the convention since negotiations began years ago. She joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss her concerns and how the Convention fits within the broader global political and policing frameworks.

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July 27, 2026 1 comment Podcasts
༒ Nhac Ny ༒, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: The Trouble With Canada’s Quiet Decision to Sign the UN Cybercrime Convention

Last week, the government announced that Canada has signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, with Ministers Anita Anand, Gary Anandasangaree and Sean Fraser touting the treaty’s child protection provisions and human rights safeguards, which were described as “among the strongest found in an international criminal justice treaty.” The announcement, released in mid-July with few paying attention, left out much of the story. The reality is that the convention is not primarily a cybercrime treaty at all, but rather a sweeping cross-border surveillance and electronic evidence-sharing agreement that Canada originally opposed, that leading human rights groups and twenty Canadian organizations and experts urged the government to reject, and that key allies have thus far declined to sign. While signing the convention does not create binding obligations (that requires ratification), the decision to sign a treaty that the government declined to sign at the official ceremony less than a year ago raises troubling questions. This post seeks to answer three of them: what is this treaty, what are the risks, and what, if anything, changed in the last nine months?

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July 23, 2026 3 comments News