Articles by: Michael Geist

Privacy Commissioner Launches SWIFT Investigation

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has announced that she has launched an investigation into the privacy issues related to SWIFT.  It is good to see that the Commissioner is willing to proceed on this issue, but frustrating that they have not taken the same approach with other privacy issues involving […]

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August 14, 2006 Comments are Disabled News

So Much for the Death of Radio

Statistics Canada reports that the Canadian private sector radio industry enjoyed its highest profits in recent history with the largest annual increase in revenue in 17 years.

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August 14, 2006 Comments are Disabled News

Canadian Online Learning Company Hit With Patent Suit

A Waterloo, Ontario company spends years developing new technologies that leverage the power of the Internet.  It develops a global following.  Then, seemingly out of the blue, it is hit with a patent infringement suit by a U.S. company, instantly facing the prospect of years of costly litigation in U.S. courts.  With limited resources, it must defend itself by arguing that the patents are invalid.

So begins my weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC International version, homepage version) which does not discuss the RIM-NTP patent suit but rather the recent patent lawsuit launched by Blackboard, a learning management system company, against Desire2Learn, a Canadian competitor.  Both the patent and the lawsuit have generated enormous anger within the academic and open source software communities.

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August 14, 2006 4 comments Columns

Shades of Another Battle of Waterloo

Appeared in the Toronto Star on August 14, 2006 as Shades of Another Battle of Waterloo Appeared in the BBC on August 14, 2006 as Patent Battle over Teaching Tools   A Waterloo, Ontario company spends years developing new technologies that leverage the power of the Internet.  It develops a […]

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August 14, 2006 1 comment Columns Archive

Man Charged For Spoofing Premier’s Email

CBC is reporting that a Newfoundland man has been charged for spoofing Premier Danny Williams email. The government apparently briefly shut down their email system in response to the spoofing.

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August 10, 2006 Comments are Disabled News