A recent cyber-squatting dispute sheds light on the fact that although avenues for resolutions exist, cybersquatting is still a major problem plaguing internet commerce today. It all started when US media giant Viacom, decided to move material about its TV show 'Jackass' to the domain name 'jackass.com', but realized that a serial cybersquatter based in the Virgin Islands (owned […]
Kevin Osborne is a first year law student at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Legal Values: Challenges in Intellectual Property course When you give your email address to a website, do you expect that site to offer it to anyone who asks for it? How much privacy do you expect? A recent case heard […]
James Gannon is an Osgoode Hall alumnus and is currently an articling student at McCarthy Tétrault. Much attention has recently been paid to proposed legislation that would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to step up their efforts to prevent subscribers from downloading copyright-protected content through the Internet connections they provide. These initiatives are often described […]
Susan Corbett is a Senior Lecturer in Commercial Law, Victoria University of Wellington In response to a barrage of criticism, unprecedented in response to a topic as alien to the average kiwi as copyright law, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has announced that section 92A of the Copyright Act 1994 will not come into force […]
Recent cases in the U.S. have spotlighted the growing concern over the ease with which technology can be improperly used by jurors and the impact this has on the fairness of trials. Specifically, the use of cell phones and PDA’s to disseminate confidential information, and even the use of search engines and online databases to […]
Richard Warman is an Ottawa-based lawyer active in human rights law and is well known for initiating complaints against white supremacists and neo-nazis for Canadian Human Rights Act violations in the realm of the Internet. One of Warman’s most recent targets is the controversial online forum, FreeDominion.ca. In the action, Warman claims damages for allegedly […]
Adam Bucci is a first year law student at Osgoode Hall taking the "Legal Values: Challenges in Intellectual Property" course. I would like to address the impact that open source software has had on our intellectual property regime. In this post, I will: (i) outline some strong claims for significantly diluting - if not wholly […]
A proposal to impose a levy on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Rogers and Shaw Communications Inc. to fund the creation of new media content in Canada is harmful, according to recent arguments heard by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The proposal of a three percent levy on Canadian ISP revenues has the stated purpose […]
Scientific discourse has always been encouraged as a means of nurturing accuracy and development, but according to a recent article by Andre Picard, the internet has changed the nature of scientific debate for the worse. According to Picard, in the world of cyberspace, scientific “evidence” now increasingly takes the form of anecdotal reports, and “debate” […]
Two recent Ontario Superior Court of Justice judgments have allowed for law enforcement agencies to obtain subscriber information from internet service providers without a warrant. In both cases police officers used IP addresses of suspected child pornography carriers, which they had obtained themselves, to get corresponding names and addresses. This has alarmed privacy advocates, and […]