Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

Canada’s Do-Not-Call Legislation (Bill C-37) has now been enacted and will come into force upon a date to be set by the Governor in Council. The legislation contains a number of exceptions in respect of a national do-not-call list (but exempt entities, except those calling to conduct surveys, must still maintain their own do-not-call lists):

- registered charities
- pre-existing business relationship (unless a do-not-call request has been made)
- candidates and registered political parties
- surveys
- solicitation of subscriptions to newspapers of general circulation

Alec Saunders reported hearing that Rogers Cable and Shaw Cable may be blocking podcasts. It wasn’t clear whether this was all podcasts or only those being distributed using P2P distribution tools that are also commonly used to distribute infringing materials. I sincerely hope his information is wrong. Otherwise, VOIP will be next.

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Jeff Angus, a “knowledge management and restructuring consultant”, writing in eWeek about the Sony DRM situation, blames the lawyers. I know people like to blame lawyers for most things that go wrong, but I’d be very surprised that the law department at Sony would have made the decision to use DRM technology, selected the specific DRM used or performed any testing/due diligence prior to incorporating it into the Sony CDs. Judging by Mr. Angus’ other comments, sounds like he just hates lawyers.

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ZDNet UK reported that:

The European Union is considering whether to force telecoms operators and Internet service providers to retain customer data for up to a year. On Wednesday afternoon, a parliamentary committee approved these plans, which will now be voted on by the EU Council.

While several governments want these requirements enacted in order to aid investigations into terrorism, the music industry is lobbying to allow this data to be used to investigate all crimes, including copyright violations. A number of groups, including The Open Rights Group, a UK digital rights organisation, are opposing such moves.

From ZDNet

Engadget is reporting that IO Data Device Corporation announced that certain models in their “HDP-U” line of portable hard drives were shipped with the “W32/Tompai-A” trojan. Engadget took issue with how IO Data Device handled the problem - they didn’t release the serial numbers of infected drives until some 14 hours after the announcement of the infection.

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Yesterday, John D. Gregory ( General Counsel - Policy Division, Ministry of the Attorney General) gave a presentation at the Toronto Computer Lawyers Group (TCLG) on the topic of Internet Jurisdiction. He promised to post a copy of his presentation on the TCLG website within a few days.

Although they were not cooperative at first, and then were slow in responding, the Blogger Support Team seems to now be serious about helping address complaints about spam blogs. Maybe it was the fact that my email was formal, serious and written by an attorney. But, in any event, they recently wrote me to confirm that all the Blogger/Blogspot sites that I had previously identified as containing spam (and in particular, items about me or extracted from my website) have now been removed, and that they were forwarding my email which also contained a list of a few spam sites not hosted by them, to the Adsense team to help resolve issues regarding those other sites. Bravo Google!

I recently reviewed a relative’s Bell Canada phone bill. Its one of their new consolidated “one bill” format that combines the charges for the various services. Seems that some of the digital bundle savings were not being passed on as originally promised. When confronted with the overcharging, Bell’s “Television Services” division provided a retroactive credit (translation - the credit was posted to the customer’s account but had not yet been carried over to the “one bill”. Since the credit does not appear on the “one bill” until the following month, Bell advised that the current bill had to be paid in full or interest would be charged. So the message is clear - pay us what we billed you, even if we overcharged you and clearly acknowledge doing so, or there will be interest to pay.

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