Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

Interested in seeing how your existing Internet provider compares to your other alternatives? One good information source is Broadband Reports. The site includes tools to measure your current bandwidth, but more importantly, it also provides statistics on what other users have been getting from both your ISP and its competitors.

I recently compared Rogers against Bell Sympatico.

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The Lemelson-MIT Program has released an Inventor’s Handbook to address the independent inventor’s and aspiring entrepreneur’s most frequently asked questions regarding United States patents and hopefully to provide some helpful information on the patenting and commercialization processes.

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When I see numbers in a story, I’m always tempted to see if they add up.

Wired News (”Outsourcing to the Heartland”) is featuring an article about Rural Sourcing, a company that offers an alternative to off shore outsourcing by tapping into the growing number of IT professional in rural America. The company claims cost savings of 30-50% over the highest cost urban centers. But I’m having trouble making sense of the numbers.

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Boing Boing has a post citing RTE News that providing the US Department of Homeland Security with air passenger data about EU citizens is contrary to EU law.

The Advocate General, the top legal advisor of the European Court of Justice, says that last year’s air passenger data agreement must be annulled because it breached EU law.

The Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice accepts the opinion of the Advocate General in about 80% of cases

The Globe and Mail’s technology section has an article about a local company, TrueLocal of Guelph, Ontario. TrueLocal is a search engine that specializes in providing users with search results for local brick-and-mortar businesses.

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The Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School has launched an effort to build a collaboratively-created, public-access law dictionary and encyclopedia - WEX. WEX will be the successor to, and will incorporate much of the material originally developed for, the LII’s “Law about…” pages.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is calling the country’s phone companies onto the carpet over revelations in Maclean’s that U.S. databrokers are selling the home and cellphone records of Canadian consumers. The cell phone operators have been given 10 days to report back with details of how the breaches occurred and what steps have been taken to improve security in the future.

Digital Home Canada

MyVoipProvider.com has created an online tool that can help identify the lowest cost VOIP provider from among 155 (with another 350 being added shortly). It also lists VOIP providers by country (with 49 VOIP providers currently listed for Canada)