Legal Commentary

UK regulators ban another iPhone ad

Posted on November 27, 2008
Wired reports that the UK has banned an iPhone ad on the basis that it exaggerates the speed at which the phone operates.  They also banned an iPhone ad a few months ago on the basis that the claim that all parts of the internet are on the phone was false because it doesn’t support [...

Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: a generational war

Posted on November 26, 2008
That’s the title of my Slaw post from today, and the title of an article from socialcomputingmagazine.com. My post reads: That?s the title of an article worth reading at social computing magazine.com. (And speaking of social media, this article came to my attention via a Twitter post by Mathew Ingram...

.tel directory will keep you in loop

Posted on November 24, 2008
For the London Free Press - November 24, 2008 Read this on Canoe The new .tel Internet top level domain, or TLD (.com is an example of a TLD) launching soon may revolutionize the way we keep in touch — assuming it becomes widely adopted. The new ...

Google Flu Trends privacy concerns

Posted on November 21, 2008
Google recenty announced that they would use search requests to plot flu trends.  They claim they can show flu trends 2 weeks faster than traditional methods.  The trend data is anonymized so no one looking at the trends knows, for example, that I might have been one of the individuals who searched for “flu remedies”...

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CRTC sides with Bell on throttling complaint - but will consider net neutrality later

Posted on November 20, 2008
The big news today is the CRTC decision that denied CAIP’s application complaining about Bell’s internet throttling.  The CRTC has however made it clear that it is not through with teh net neutrality issue. From the CRTC’s press release: ?CAIP?s application asked us to only consider the specific issue of wholesale traffic shaping within a specific context...

Fake Canada Revenue Agency letter scam

Posted on November 18, 2008
Connie Crosby reports on Slaw that people are getting emails and letters that purport to be from the CRA.  They say the CRA owes the people money, but the CRA does not have enough info to pay them.  Of course, the scam is that if people respond with the requested info, they have given away [...

Copyright laws weaving a wicked web

Posted on November 17, 2008
For the London Free Press - November 17, 2008 Read this on Canoe Be careful what you wish for. In this year’s U.S. and Canadian election campaigns, politicians discovered they are not immune from the laws they make. In the U.S., a copyright controversy involved Republican presidential candidate John McCain and YouTube...

Disruptive Chinese factories

Posted on November 13, 2008
No - not in the sense of being polluters, or making toxic products - but in the sense of new ways to design, market and sell products that are disruptive to the whole supply chain. Robert Scoble has an interesting article on the subject.  It says in part: Yesterday he showed me a new gadget that will [...

The economics of spam

Posted on November 12, 2008
Thats the title of my Slaw post for today. It reads as follows: Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego have published a paper on a study they did on spam. They actually took over part of an existing spam botnet, and sent their own spam to test the response...

AVG anti-virus false positive

Posted on November 11, 2008
Slashdot and other sources are reporting that an update to the popular AVG anti-virus product labels a critical file in Windows XP - user32.dll - as a virus that needs to be removed.  If you do that, it cripples the computer. AVG has posted a fix, and I’m sure will offer an update to correct the issue...

Complaint spurred Ticketmaster change

Posted on November 10, 2008
For the London Free Press - November 10, 2008 Read this on Canoe In a recent decision, Canada’s assistant privacy commissioner expressed “grave concern” after finding a major online company operating nationwide was violating federal privacy laws, years after the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) took effect...

Canadian bittorrent index site asks court if it is legal

Posted on November 07, 2008
A Canoe tech article says that the owner of the isohunt search engine for bitorrent files has asked the BC Supreme court to rule on whether it violates the copyright Act. Seems that the Canadian Recording Industry Association has demanded that he take down the links - so rather than waiting for them to take action, [...

I’m officially banning “Nice to meet you” from my vocabulary

Posted on November 05, 2008
That’s the title of my Slaw post for today. It reads as follows: With all the exposure we get these days - including published articles, speaking engagements, blogs, websites, twitter, facebook, linkedin, flickr, ? - when do we actually ?meet? someone for the first time? When we meet someone in person, we may very well have seen them [...

Peer-to-peer file sharing now a fact of Internet life

Posted on November 03, 2008
For the London Free Press - Nov 3, 2008 Read this on Canoe The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently marked the five-year anniversary of the Recording Industry of America’s (RIAA) mass litigation campaign to curtail music piracy on the Internet by releasing a comprehensive review...

eLegal is 4 years old

Posted on October 31, 2008
It doesn’t seem like its been this long, but I made my first blog entry 4 years ago tomorrow.  My first entry was a Free Press article I wrote about the then new Canadian version of the Creative commons license.

Use it, prove it, or lose it the law on trade-marks

Posted on October 29, 2008
for the London Free Press - October 27, 2008 Read this on Canoe Many businesses rely on the branding of their products to increase profitability and secure a place in highly competitive markets. A recent Federal Court, Trial Division, decision illustrates how important it is for a business to be able to prove it has used its trade-marks [...

New political party? - the Nerd Party

Posted on October 24, 2008
Given that we have just held our federal election, and the US is about to have theirs, a post on Boing Boing today entitled How the win the nerd vote caught my eye. It has 10 points:  Broadband everywhere, universal healthcare, no federal tax on Internet purchases, renewed commitment to education, renewed commitment to science, real [...

Australian data breach survey

Posted on October 23, 2008
Australian IT reports on a survey that paints a grim picture of data breach problems in Australia.  I’m always a bit skeptical of survey results, especially when they are commissioned by an entity that’s trying to sell a product aimed at righting the wrongs shown in the survey...

Word processors won’t help in court

Posted on October 20, 2008
For the London Free Press - October 20, 2008 Read this on Canoe Agreements are often created using standard “boilerplate” wording. A British court was recently critical of bad drafting and attacked the lawyers who let word processors do their thinking for them...

CRTC hearings on broadcasting and new media

Posted on October 16, 2008
Michael notes that the CRTC has issued a notice detailing its upcoming hearings on broadcasting and new media, and asking for interested parties to participate. The CRTC has essentially kept its hands off the Internet so far.  These hearings will consider whether that should continue, or whether the CRTC should regulate “broadcasting” over the Internet...

Entrepreneurs should be investor ready - for themselves

Posted on October 15, 2008
That’s the title of my weekly Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows: Lawyers often talk about how entrepreneurs should make their companies ?investor ready?. This uses the term ?investor? in the widest sense, meaning everything from a bank loan, to a VC investment, to the sale of the business to Google that allows the owner [...

Saturday Oct 11 is International day of protest against surveillance

Posted on October 10, 2008
A reminder of my recent post on Slaw and here that tomorrow is being promoted in Europe as a day of protest against surveillance. Its no wonder that this is happening, especially in light of things like David Fraser posts about today, where cameras are being used in UK parks to catch litterers and pooper scooper [...

IT infrastructure - think disaster prevention, not disaster recovery

Posted on October 08, 2008
That’s the title of my weekly Slaw post. It is reproduced here: That was the message delivered last night by Steve Spencer of Digital Fortress Corporation at the monthly Internetwork meeting. He makes a good point. Many people think about disaster recovery when dealing with business continuity plans...

U.S. court decision big win for consumers

Posted on October 06, 2008
For the London Free Press - October 6, 2008 Read this on Canoe In a major victory for American consumers, the Washington state Supreme Court, following in the footsteps of Ontario consumer protection laws, has held AT&T cannot remove a consumer’s right to file a class-action lawsuit...

Want something to do this weekend? - sign up on the Do Not Call list

Posted on October 03, 2008
The Canadian Do Not Call registry went live this week - and was so popular it had trouble coping with the volumes.  So if you want to cut down (note I said cut down, not eliminate - there are many exceptions), take a few minutes this weekend to sign up...

Cloud computing controversy

Posted on October 01, 2008
That’s the title of my post on Slaw today. It reads as follows: We see the term ?cloud computing? a lot these days. Its a term that?s hard to define - like Web 2.0. It essentially means having your software work ?out there? somewhere, and/or your data reside ?out there? somewhere - rather than on a computer [...

Stallman - Cloud computing is a trap

Posted on September 30, 2008
The Guardian published an article entitled Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman coincidentally on the same day as my Free Press article from yesterday on the topic. Stallman is quoted as bluntly saying: “It’s stupidity...

Cloud computing presents real concerns over privacy issues

Posted on September 29, 2008
For the London Free Press - September 29, 2008 Read this on Canoe We are moving into “cloud” computing, where users increasingly rely on data and software residing somewhere out there on the Internet. That means we have little direct knowledge of, involvement with or control over the data or its location...

Britain becoming Orwellian surveillance society

Posted on September 26, 2008
Cory Doctorow has a post on Boing Boing entitled Britain will make foreigners carry RFID identity cards and will put us in a huge, Orwellian database: the rest of Britain will be next.  Its worth a read. He says in part: My family fled the Soviet Union after the war...

Today is World Day Against Software Patents

Posted on September 24, 2008
From my post to Slaw today: Slashdot reports that today has been declared World Day Against Software Patents by the European based Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure They believe that software patents impede innovation and investment. So depending on what side of this debate one falls on, feel free to either celebrate and promote it, or cringe [...

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