Post Tagged with: "jurisdiction"

Courts Adopt Aggressive Approach in Cross-Border Internet Jurisdiction Cases

Appeared in the Toronto Star on January 6, 2013 as Courts Adopt Aggressive Approach in Cross-Border Internet Jurisdiction Cases In a world where data now moves effortlessly between computers on the Internet without regard for geographic borders, is the appearance of a website on a computer screen sufficient for a […]

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January 9, 2013 Comments are Disabled Columns Archive

All Your Internets Belong to US, Continued: The Bodog.com Case

Imagine a scenario in which a country enacts a law that bans the sale of asbestos and includes the power to seize the assets of any company selling the product anywhere in the world. The country tests the law by obtaining a court order to seize key assets of a Canadian company, whose operations with hundreds of employees takes a major hit. The Canadian government is outraged, promising to support the company in its efforts to restore its operations.

That is the opening of my technology law column this week (Toronto Star version, homepage version) which continues by noting this scenario became reality last week, though the product was not asbestos and the Canadian government has yet to respond. The case involves Bodog.com, a Canadian-owned online sports gaming site and the country doing the seizing was the United States. Supporting online gaming operations will undoubtedly make governments somewhat squeamish, but the broader implications of last week’s seizure touch on millions of websites and Internet companies who now find themselves subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

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March 6, 2012 30 comments Columns

All Your Internets Belong To US, Continued

Appeared on March 4, 2012 in the Toronto Star as Bodog.com case sends warning to all Canadian websites Imagine a scenario in which a country enacts a law that bans the sale of asbestos and includes the power to seize the assets of any company selling the product anywhere in […]

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March 5, 2012 1 comment Columns Archive

U.S. Seizes Canadian-Owned and Registered Domain Name

The EasyDNS blog has an excellent – albeit scary – post on the U.S. government seizure of bodog.com, the Canadian-owned online gambling site. The domain was seized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security despite the fact that it was Canadian registered. The only U.S. connection is that the dot-com […]

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March 1, 2012 8 comments News

Location Matters Up in the Cloud

The Wikileaks disclosure of hundreds of U.S. diplomatic cables has dominated news coverage for the past two weeks as governments struggled to respond to public disclosure of sensitive, secret information.  My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) noted that one of the most noteworthy developments in the first week was Amazon’s decision to abruptly stop hosting the Wikileaks site hours after U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman exerted political pressure on the company to do so.  

Amazon is best known for its e-commerce site, yet it is also one of the world’s leading cloud computing providers, offering instant website hosting to thousands of companies and websites. In recent years, the combination of massive computer server farms in remote locations and high speed networks have enabled cloud computing to emerge as a critical mechanism for offering online services and delivering Internet content.

After Amazon pulled the plug, Wikileaks quickly shifted to a European host, demonstrating how easily sites can shift from one cloud provider to another. Although it seems counter-intuitive to consider the physical location of cloud computing equipment when discussing services that by their very definition operate across borders in the “cloud”, the Wikileaks-Amazon incident provided an important reminder that location matters when it comes to cloud computing.

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December 10, 2010 24 comments Columns