My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) focuses on wireless number portability, which makes its much-anticipated debut on Wednesday, allowing Canadian consumers to change their cellphone provider without surrendering their current phone number. I note that while wireless number portability removes one lock that the providers have […]
Post Tagged with: "bernier"
Canada’s Copyright Kyoto
John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail has a column today (unfortunately behind a paywall) on the copyright issue. The column gets many of the issues right – the complexity of the file, the likelihood of greater U.S. pressure, and the fact that Canada is a net importer of cultural goods. The piece also contains a couple of newsworthy tidbids including word that Industry Minister Bernier and Canadian Heritage Minister Oda met last week to work out a final agreement on a copyright bill but failed to do so. It also confirms that U.S. Ambassador Wilkins recently sent a "stern letter" to Prime Minister Harper on intellectual property enforcement.
That said, it gets several things wrong. First, Ibbitson says the issue boils down to:
Copyright owners, from garage bands to Disney, want strict prohibitions on practices and technologies that allow people to record, copy and download copyrighted works without paying for them. Their champion is the Heritage Minister. The Industry Minister, however, represents the ordinary user, the educator, the entrepreneur, who wants the greatest possible latitude in exploiting the knowledge and information available on discs, the Web and in databases.
Ibbitson gets it half-right.
Should the Vancouver Olympic Organizers Own “Winter”?
With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games scheduled for Vancouver, the Canadian Olympic Committee has set the goal of "owning the podium." Today the Olympic Committee took the first step toward another form of ownership – language. Industry Minister Maxime Bernier introduced Bill C-47, the Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act, legislation that provides the Vancouver Olympic organizers with remarkable power over the language and symbols associated with the Olympics. The legislation is supposedly intended to deal with ambush marketing, which are attempts by businesses to associate themselves with the Olympics without becoming official sponsors. Similar legislation has been introduced in other countries that have hosted the Olympics, though there are questions about the effectiveness of the approach.
While it is understandable that the Olympic organizers want to maximize the marketing potential of the games, the bill raises several concerns.
IP in QP
Intellectual property was raised in the House of Commons yesterday, though both the question and the answer are a little difficult to understand: Mr. Robert Vincent (Shefford, BQ): Mr. Speaker, copyright infringement costs between $20 billion and $30 billion annually in losses to our businesses. For example, Polyform in […]
Bernier Before the Industry Committee
Industry Minister Maxime Bernier spent two hours before the Standing Committee on Industry, Science, and Technology yesterday afternoon to talk telecom deregulation. I attended the hearing and came away with several impressions. First, much of the discussion fails to distinguish between communications services as the discussion frequently veers between local […]
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