Columns

The Slippery Slope of Two-Tier Email

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC Version, webpage version) examines America Online and Yahoo!’ s recent announcement of a new fee-based system for commercial email. I argue that certified email will do little to address spam and may not attract a large client base. Rather, its more significant impact lies in the fact that it is yet another step toward the two-tiered Internet that will ultimately shift new costs to consumers.

February 12, 2006 — Comments are Disabled — Columns

The Digital Road Leads Out of Rome

My weekly Law Bytes column (BBC version, homepage version) focuses on last week's OECD meeting on the future of the digital economy. The column notes that the discussion pointed to two competing approaches for the distribution of content in the Internet era, one based on DRM and the other on […]

February 8, 2006 — Comments are Disabled — Columns

The Risks and Rewards of Data Retention

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, freely available version, BBC version) examines the U.S. Department of Justice’s demand for search data from the world’s leading search engines. I argue that while much of the focus has been on the privacy implications of the USDOJ request, the story highlights […]

January 30, 2006 — 2 comments — Columns

New Yahoo Case Raises Old Questions

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, freely available version, BBC International version) examines the recent 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Yahoo decision involving the long-running battle over Internet jurisdiction. I argue that while the legal and jurisdictional implications are important, the Internet considerations highlight the complexity associated with […]

January 25, 2006 — Comments are Disabled — Columns

Time To Clean Up Canadian Copyright

While there has been great interest in the Bulte story for the past two weeks (which continues with Cory Doctorow's terrific op-ed yesterday on the dangers of U.S. style copyright reform in the Toronto Star, Rob Hyndman's great post on the impact of blogs, and the Globe's Matthew Ingram), I […]

January 15, 2006 — 3 comments — Columns