Digital Copyright Canada

I thought I would point people to a discussion following a podcast interview that Jesse Brown did of the Ontario Privacy Commissioner. It turns out that she wishes to use DRM technology to enforce "privacy", something many of us will understand to be counter-productive.

Canada’s Privacy Community has written to the Ministers responsible for Canadian copyright policy, urging them to consult broadly prior to introducing copyright legislation that may undermine Canadians’ privacy and security rights. The letter follows earlier correspondence from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada that observed that any copyright bill that includes anti-circumvention laws and ISP subscriber data retention obligations would raise significant privacy concerns for Canadians.

From CIPPIC.

CIPPIC calls for Public Registry of Data Breaches and Limits to Online Collection of Kids’ Data

Responding to a federal government consultation on reform of data protection law, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (“CIPPIC”) is calling for the establishment of a centralized, electronic registry of corporate data breaches that would be publicly-accessible. CIPPIC is a legal clinic based at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.

Michael Geist's weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, Homepage version) focuses on a recent case in which a British Columbia court ordered Hush Communications to decrypt hundreds of emails and to send them to the U.S. law enforcement officials. Faced with a valid court order, the company complied, shipping 12 CDs filled with unencrypted personal email to investigators in California. The case challenges several myths that have developed about privacy, law enforcement, and the Internet.