The government continues to drag its feet on bringing forward anti-spam regulations – Canada’s anti-spam law received royal assent in 2010 but won’t take effect until 2013 at the earliest – but the CRTC seems determined to move things forward. Yesterday it released two information bulletins that provide guidelines on […]
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Ibbitson on the End of Bill C-30
The Globe’s John Ibbitson has a column on Bill C-30, the lawful access/Internet surveillance bill, that he says dying a quiet death.
The Dramatic Growth of Open Access
Heather Morrison posts an update of her ongoing series on the dramatic growth of open access, pointing to the development of open access infrastructure (institutional repositories), a massive increase in the number of journals offering free access, and the million movies now available at the Internet Archive.
ACTA: The Ethical Analysis of a Failure and Its Lessons
Luciano Floridi, the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics at the University of Hertfordshire, has written a helpful analysis of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and its failure.
Random Government Takedown Demands Point to Need for Policy
The policy document encourages officials to use the sites “as an efficient and effective additional channel to interact with the public”, noting that the Internet offers opportunities for public consultation, recruitment, collaboration, and the provision of government services.
The government acknowledges that there are risks, however. These include potential misuse of government content or the possibility of negative perceptions associated with official use. While the document establishes a myriad of rules and guidelines for use of these services, it surprisingly does not consider how to respond to the negative risks.
My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes the absence of policy direction may be partially to blame for recent revelations of government department demands to Google to remove certain content from its search database or websites. The haphazard manner in which these demands have occurred demonstrate the dangers of proceeding in an ad hoc manner in which officials race to demand the removal of lawful content without uniform policies or guidelines.
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