Post Tagged with: "free speech"

Ottawa Grocery Chain Fires Employees over Facebook Posting

The Ottawa Sun has the details on the firings.

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January 18, 2007 44 comments News

Project Cleanfeed Canada

Yesterday Canada's largest ISPs, including Bell, Bell Aliant, MTS Allstream, Rogers, Shaw, SaskTel, Telus, and Videotron, announced the launch of Project Cleanfeed Canada in partnership with cybertip.ca.  The project will allow the ISPs to block access to hundreds of child pornography sites.  The list of sites will be generated by […]

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November 24, 2006 74 comments News

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.

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August 28, 2006 12 comments Columns

Tough Choice for CRTC in Hate Blocking Case

Appeared in the Toronto Star on August 28, 2006 as Content Blocking a Can of Worms    More than a decade ago, John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, coined the phrase "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Last week, the Canadian […]

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August 28, 2006 5 comments Columns Archive

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. 

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July 31, 2006 4 comments Columns