[Ed.’s (me) note – this post has been updated at the bottom to reflect new developments in the story]
Hoo boy, I do not want to write this post. If there is one thing that scares me it’s wading into the language wars in Québec. I love this province; it’s been my home for all my life, I speak and work in French, I have francophone friends, and we all get along thanks to our shared love of soft runny cheeses, alcohol and nos Habitants (not necessarily in that order). So I don’t like rocking the boat, ya know? But we’ve got ourselves a legitimate internet law question here which I must chronicle. And possibly a legitimate legal debate between lawyers! So ‘stie calice de tabernac, let’s do this.
Here are the slides of a presentation I gave this morning for the Plank Breakfast Club, an amazing new series happening at the awesome company where I spent five years, Plank. My audience was enraptured as I regaled them with how their organizations are screwed under Canada’s Anti-Spam Law. I was enraptured by some very good questions:
(pic courtesy of @iamflb, used without permission, probably)
Last Wednesday, the government announced that Bill C-28, aka Canada’s Anti-Spam law, aka CASL, aka “An Act to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by regulating certain activities that discourage reliance on electronic means of carrying out commercial activities, and to amend the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act, the Competition Act, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and the Telecommunications Act” (no really that’s its official title, click the link) will come into force July 1, 2014, thus putting an end to spam in Canada forever. Or something like that.
The Court of Appeal of Québec and its multiple phallic columns
It has been a very busy couple of weeks for internet law in Canada. Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada declared Alberta’s privacy law unconstitutional and essentially junked the whole thing. This week, the Conservative government introduced Bill C-13, the so-called “Cyberbullying legislation”, which some are already calling a bullshit excuse for more of the lawful access crap we had with Bill C-30. That’s some important stuff I’ll write about eventually, I swear. But I want to go back to the heady days of two weeks ago, when the Quebec Court of Appeal made a ruling against eBay that essentially makes my job drafting Terms of Use a complete waste of time. That’ll teach me to charge people hundreds of dollars an hour for it.
If you have read the news in the last couple of weeks, or turned on CBC radio, or listened to talk radio, you may have read some quotes from me or heard the dulcet tones of my voice. I have been media whoring like, well, a media whore. Last week it was the Brian Burke lawsuit. This week it was the sad story of the British Columbia teacher who was totally screwed by his ex-girlfriend online and is still suffering for it. These cases have brought to light the messy ugly side of the internet. Or as some people have argued, a terrible overreaction in the Brian Burke case. Let’s use these cases to talk about online defamation, what you should know about it, and the effects on you as both a potential plaintiff and defendant, you cocksucking whore (see what i did there?).
Now that I have your attention…
These are the slides for a presentation I gave last Thursday to the cool kids at the Intellectual Property, Information Technology and Policy Club of McGill’s Faculty of Law, which I thought you might enjoy. It really has porn and Star Trek in it! Unfortunately you don’t get the awesome banter I am famous for, but it’s still a fun presentation nonetheless. Did I mention Star Trek? And porn, the kind you see on www.tubev.sex?
As Scribd converts documents to PDFs when you upload, the YouTube videos in the presentation are unplayable from the slides. Here they are, in order:
Rhymin’ and Stealin’ Slide 6
Mister Worf, Fire the Mashups Slide 18
Oh, Pretty Woman Slide 24
Pretty Woman Slide 24
Just one more vid Slide 31
For the tl;dr crowd, here’s the conclusion of the presentation: you can be creative online, but you better not be a pirate and make any $$$ doing it.
Greetings, internet denizens! Sorry for the lack of posting lately. I think the internet took the month of January off, so there was really no news to report. But yesterday, there was good news! The Conservative government has decided to kill Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, or as we liked to call it around here, the Vic Toews is an Idiot Act.
We wrote quite a bit about C-30 and its various nefarious schemes. Suffice it to say, when a Federal Minister says things like “you are either for this bill or you are a child molester” (I’m paraphrasing, but not by much) there is going to be some media attention. The internet exploded with rage (as it is wont to do) at the bill last February, and the government seemed shamed somewhat. Yesterday’s announcement was too long in coming yet welcome, and was an obvious reminder that people who actually know about the internet (i.e. me) must be listened to.
Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, in describing what changes the future might hold, said yesterday that amendments or modernization of Canadian law:
“will not contain …warrantless mandatory disclosure of basic subscriber information or the requirement for telecommunications service providers to build intercept capability within their systems.”
Let’s just leave that here for posterity to remind the government of its position on this, if when they bring up “lawful access legislation” again.
Allen Mendelsohn is me. I am a lawyer specializing in internet law working out of Montreal, though sometimes I do it in front of the U.S. Capitol. That should tell you what you need to know about internet law in Canada. I also warp young legal minds at the Faculty of Law at McGill.
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Tour the interwebz with a lawyer as your guide
As the summer winds down, we’ve been feeling kind of philosophical. What does it all mean, and all that. As a practicing lawyer, I tend to focus on the little picture. We’ve got a problem, it relates to one thing, we try to solve it. FOCUS, dammit. That translates to the way I’ve written here at AM.com. A new piece of legislation passes, an interesting court case comes out, some government body releases a report, and we write about the minute details of a very small slice of law and the internet. We’ve never really looked at the big picture and the big issues. Until now.
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Tagged: I need to be regulated, why internet law is important to YOU
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