Columns

Education Ministers’ Copyright Proposal Needs a Rewrite

As thousands of children across the province return to school tomorrow, nearly everyone will be asking "what did you do this summer?" If the question were posed to Education Minister Sandra Pupatello, her candid reply might be that she was working with her fellow Provincial Ministers of Education on reforms that will have damaging consequences on Internet use in Canada.

So begins this week's Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) which focuses on the disasterous push from the CMEC to establish a specific educational exception for the use of publicly-available Internet materials. While the CMEC proposal is at least better than Access Copyright's proposed extended license for Internet content (the column reveals that AC has approached Canadian Heritage for funding to support becoming the Canadian collective for the International Standard Text Code – a new standard for "textual works" that can be applied to everything from books to blogs and thus form the basis for a future license), there are potentially several negative long-term effects.

I point to five issues in particular.

September 4, 2006 — 11 comments — Columns

Reflecting on the CRTC’s Hate Site Blocking Decision

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) looks at last week's flurry of activity over Internet-based hate sites at the CRTC, including the request for an order to permit voluntary blocking and the Commission's decision to deny the request on Friday.

Had the CRTC addressed the substantive questions, the case would have presented an enormously difficult choice. There is little doubt that the content in question is illegal and that Warman faces a serious threat. By directly targeting Warman, the foreign sites have arguably brought themselves within Canada's jurisdiction. Further, by merely asking the CRTC to issue a voluntary order, Warman avoided state-sanctioned censorship and placed the issue in the hands of ISPs.

Despite the good intentions behind the application, however, there remains some cause for concern.

August 28, 2006 — 12 comments — Columns

Statscan Survey Shows Internet’s Potential and Pitfalls

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) examines recent Statistics Canada data on Internet use. The survey found that nearly 17 million Canadians – 68 percent of the adult population – used the Internet for personal non-business reasons last year. Moreover, almost two-thirds of Canadian adults who […]

August 21, 2006 — 1 comment — Columns

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.

August 14, 2006 — 4 comments — Columns

Canadian Libel Law Raises Net Free Speech Chill

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC international version, homepage version) places the spotlight on this week’s fundraiser in support of P2Pnet.net, a British Columbia-based website that is being sued for defamation for comments posted on the site by its readers. The importance of the Internet intermediary liabilty issue extends well beyond just Internet service providers – corporate websites that allow for user feedback, education websites featuring chatrooms, or even individual bloggers who permit comments face the prospect of demands to remove content that is alleged to violate the law.

The difficult question is not whether these sites and services have the right to voluntarily remove offending content if they so choose – no one doubts that they do – but rather whether sites can be compelled to remove allegedly unlawful or infringing content under threat of potential legal liability. The answer is not as straightforward as one might expect since Canadian law varies depending on the type of content or the nature of the allegations.

July 31, 2006 — 4 comments — Columns