Watch the live webcast of the Fall 2011 Cloud Computing Conference: Law and Policy Issues in the Cloud here. The Conference begins at 9:00 am Friday, October 14, and ends at 5:00 pm the same day.
Following Vancouver’s example in June, social media has once again been enlisted to help identify the rioters and looters of London’s riots last week. Scotland Yard has posted stills from surveillance cameras on their Flickr account, asking for help in identifying suspects. And independent “name-and-shame” sites have also cropped up, including one Tumblr site called “Catch a Looter”. A twist in London’s case, however, is the potential use of face recognition technology, a tool the Vancouver Police Department declined to use in their investigations. Read the rest of this entry »
TekSavvy CEO Marc Gaudrault recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Financial Post, encouraging Canadians to stay on top of current, major telecom developments, as it so passionately did in its fight against UBB, because the outcome of these issues will have tangible and far-reaching effects on all Canadian telecom consumers. The best part of the piece, is the succinct outline of those issues, which Gaudrault dubbed the “telecom-policy quadruple play”, four major telecom issues currently facing either regulatory or government scrutiny. Here they are again, with a little more detail, a brief 101 on the major telecom issues Canada faces. Read the rest of this entry »
Enforcement has always been the bane of any regulatory agency’s existence. Regulation without teeth hardly merits real attention, or compliance, from those being regulated. In documents released on Friday, Professor Geist of the University of Ottawa, has found the CRTC’s well-publicised Telecom Regulatory Policy (2009), policy which is supposed to regulate net neutrality in Canada, to be rather, well, toothless. Read the rest of this entry »
Leading ISPs in America, like Comcast and Verizon, have made a voluntary deal with movie studios and record labels to begin monitoring ISP accounts for possible piracy. Called the “Copyright Alert System“, consumers would be subject to a series of alerts if they are suspected of illegal downloading, with each subsequent alert increasingly threatening in tone and consequence. Read the rest of this entry »
On the day America celebrated its independence, Microsoft announced its growing presence in the Chinese market for online searches with a deal with Baidu, China’s leading search engine: Microsoft will supply search results for English-language queries on the Chinese search provider. More controversially, Microsoft will also censor its search results according to local law. Read the rest of this entry »
In a factum submitted last week, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) is arguing that the Supreme Court of Canada should substantially narrow the scope of Canada’s fair dealing standard, a standard established in the seminal CCH v. Law Society of Upper Canada decision in 2004.
Last year, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld a decision (SOCAN v. Bell Canada) by the Copyright Board that the provision of 30-second previews of songs, used by online music services, functions as consumer research and thus are eligible as fair dealing according to s.29 of the Copyright Act. In response to this, the CRIA is claiming here that the definition of “research” according to the Federal Court of Appeal, in the context of the fair dealing exception, is in error because that definition creates too broad and liberal of an exception, thereby conflicting with the object and purpose of the Act (to balance the interests between consumers and rights-holders). Read the rest of this entry »
The Conservative government first introduced “lawful access” legislation in three bills in late October and early November of last year. The bills’ aim was to amend the Criminal Code to give law enforcement authorities new investigative powers for computer-related crimes and to use new communications technologies for that purpose. With a Conservative majority in place, that legislation appears likely to pass. Opposition to Bill C-51, however, is also gathering momentum. Read the rest of this entry »
Formerly titled Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants, the Supreme Court of the United States on Monday struck down a California law, first enacted in 2005, which banned the sale of violent video games to minors. The main issue in the case was whether this state law violated the First Amendment right to free speech. In a 2-7 holding, the Court held that California’s law violates the First Amendment and that video games do qualify for First Amendment protection. ”Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium. And ‘the basic principles of freedom of speech … do not vary’ with a new and different communication medium.”
On Saturday, June 18, 2011 the University of Toronto Faculty of law was host to an innovatively structured gathering featuring a series of sessions and discussions on issues relating to law and technology. Based on the idea of BarCamp–user generated gatherings, or “unconferences”–the sessions arose from the suggestions and proposed discussion topics put forward by the participants and attendees at the sessions.
Sponsored by CILP, lawyerlocate.ca, SapnaLaw, Mitchell E. Kowalski and My Legal Briefcase, lawTechcamp featured sessions that dealt with a range of issues, from questions around social media in the courts, privacy issues in the context of corporations and PIPEDA, free access to law through organizations such as CanLII, and the strengths and challenges that arise from cloud computing structures, the topics were diverse and the resulting discussions were at times lively. Read the rest of this entry »
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