I’ve created a Storify version that chronicles my tweets of the SOPA protest as I pointed to articles and video of interest with a Canadian focus.

Fair Dealing by Giulia Forsythe (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/dRkXwP
Copyright
How SOPA Could Affect Canadians
I appeared on the Lange & O’Leary Exchange on Jan 18, 2012 to discuss SOPA. This interview is available on YouTube and on CBC’s website. For the CBC video, skip to 46:55.
Dark Wednesday: The Internet Protests SOPA
I appeared on CBC News to discuss the internet protest against proposed U.S. anti-piracy legislation, SOPA. Watch my interview on Youtube or on CBC’s website, for better quality.
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.
Crafting Copyright Policy to Create a Competitive Advantage
Appeared in the Hill Times on January 16, 2012 as Crafting Copyright Policy to Create a Competitive Advantage For copyright watchers, New Year’s Day has become public domain day, the day when the term of copyright expires on thousands of works. While Europe celebrated the entry of James Joyce and […]