Late last year, I wrote a column on lawful access arguing that “neither the government nor law enforcement has provided credible evidence demonstrating how the current law has impeded active investigations.” Open Media has now obtained an internal police document that shows the policy recognize this problem. The email asks […]
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Ontario Court of Appeal Issues Landmark Ruling on Privacy Tort
The Ontario Court of Appear issued a major new privacy decision, creating a new legal tort called “intrusion upon seclusion.” The decision, Jones v. Tsige, opens the door to lawsuits for breach of privacy based on circumstances involving an intentional intrusion on private affairs or concerns that is made in […]
Why Canadians Should Participate in the SOPA/PIPA Protest
First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests itself particularly strongly in Canada. As I discussed in a column last year, SOPA treats all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domain as domestic domain names for U.S. law purposes. Moreover, it defines “domestic Internet protocol addresses” – the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or Internet connection – as “an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States.” Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the U.S., Canada, and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes. To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.
Second, Canadian businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. “in rem” jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection. For those sites, the U.S. grants jurisdiction over the property of the site and opens the door to court orders requiring Internet providers to block the site and Internet search engines to stop linking to it. Should a Canadian website owner wish to challenge the court order, U.S. law asserts itself in another way, since in order for an owner to file a challenge (described as a “counter notification”), the owner must first consent to the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts.
US Copyright Lobby Wants Canada Out of TPP Until New Laws Passed, Warns of No Cultural Exceptions
While most submissions support the entry of Canada into the negotiations, it is worth noting that the major intellectual property lobby groups want to keep Canada out of the deal until we cave to the current U.S. copyright demands. The IIPA, which represents the major movie, music, and software lobby associations, points to copyright reform and new border measures as evidence of the need for Canadian reforms and states “we urge the U.S. government to use Canada’s expression of interest in the TPP negotiations as an opportunity to resolve these longstanding concerns about IPR standards and enforcement.”
Moreover, the IIPA wants it made clear that there will be no cultural exception in the agreement:
Anti-SOPA Pressure Begins to Pay Off
The massive public protest against the U.S. bill SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, has begun to pay off with promises to remove the domain name blocking provisions, delay committee votes, and an official White House position that opposes parts of the bill. A web protest is planned for Wednesday. […]
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