Last week, the government took another step toward copyright term extension in Canada, inserting extension provisions within Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s Budget Implementation Act bill.  Despite recommendations from its own copyright review, students, teachers, librarians, and copyright experts to include a registration requirement for the additional 20 years of protection, the government chose to extend term without including protection to mitigate against the harms.

Lucie Guibault is an internationally renowned expert on international copyright law, a Professor of Law and Associate Dean at Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, and the Associate Director of the school’s Law and Technology Institute. Days before the release of the bill, she joined the Law Bytes podcast for a discussion on copyright term extension, its implications and the government’s implementation options.

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This week’s Law Bytes podcast departs from the typical approach as this past week was anything but typical. As readers of this blog will know, last week I obtained access to hundreds of previously secret submissions to the government’s online harms consultation. Those submissions cast the process in a new light. This week’s Law Bytes podcast explains why the online harms consultation was a transparency and policy failure, walking through what has happened, what we know now,  and how this fits within the broader Internet regulation agenda of the Canadian government.

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Last week, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez introduced Bill C-18 – the Online News Act – the second of three planned Internet regulation bills. There is much to unpack about the provisions in the bill including the enormous power granted to the CRTC, the extensive scope of the bill that could cover tweets or LinkedIn posts, the provision that encourages the Internet platforms to dictate how Canadian media organizations spend the money at issue, and the principle that news organizations should be compensated by some entities not only for the use of their work but even for links that refer traffic back to them.

Sue Gardner is the Max Bell School of Public Policy McConnell Professor of Practice for 2021-2022. A journalist who went on to head CBC.ca and later the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia), she is the only Canadian, and the first woman, to have run a global top-5 internet site. She joins the Law Bytes podcast for a conversation about journalism, the Internet platforms, and Bill C-18.

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The CLOUD Act, which allows US law enforcement to use a warrant or subpoena to compel U.S.-based technology companies to provide data stored on servers regardless of where the data is located, was first introduced in the United States in 2018. Canada and the US recently announced plans to negotiate a Cloud Act agreement which would ease cross-border disclosures of data between the two countries.

David Fraser is a lawyer with McInnes Cooper in Halifax and one of Canada’s leading privacy experts. He regularly acts for clients on data disclosure matters and was one of the first to highlight the negotiations and its implications on his Youtube channel. He joins the Law Bytes podcast to talk about the Cloud Act, how it might fit into Canada’s privacy law framework, and how Canada should approach the negotiations.

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