Bell Canada Shuts Down Crappy Video Store That No One Used... But It's Still Throttling

from the well-look-at-that dept

Just about a year ago, we pointed out that Bell Canada was facing scrutiny for its decision to force traffic shaping on all of its resellers, often without letting them know... and yet, at nearly the same time, it launched its own crappy online video store. The whole thing seemed odd. First, Bell claimed it needed to shape traffic to deal with congestion... but then it had no problem launching its own video store that would have no traffic shaping. That certainly seems like anticompetitive behavior. Yet, as we pointed out at the time, it was difficult to believe that the Bell online video store would get any usage at all. It had an extremely limited selection, high prices and buggy Microsoft DRM. What a bargain?

Apparently, it took all of a year for Bell Canada to realize that it wasn't getting any use whatsoever, and Joe McEnaney points out that Bell Canada has quietly shut down the site... though, it's still throttling traffic from resellers. Maybe, next time, instead of trying to limit competitors and offer something crappy, Bell could spend its resources investing in bandwidth. That would have made everyone a lot happier.

Filed Under: canada, online video, throttling
Companies: bell canada

Canadian Patent Office Rejects Software And Business Model Patents

from the one-click-to-reject dept

While the US Supreme Court will soon be considering the question of software and business method patents (and the US Patent Office is still reviewing whether or not Amazon's "one-click patent" is valid), up North, the Canadian Patent Appeal Board (CPAB) appears to have resolved both issues by rejecting all software and business method patents in explaining why it's rejecting Amazon's one-click patent in Canada. Basically, the CPAB found that since software and business method patents haven't been allowed in the past, even if they're not explicitly forbidden by the patent law, it's such a big change that it should require legal action to allow them:

"since patenting business methods would involve a radical departure from the traditional patent regime, and since the patentability of such methods is a highly contentious matter, clear and unequivocal legislation is required for business methods to be patentable."

This actually makes a fair amount of sense. In the US, once the State Street case was decided, there was suddenly a mad rush to patent business methods and software, and part of the problem was that because so many people had considered the two unpatentable before, there wasn't the same set of prior art in the patent system that would have eliminated the worst abuses.

Filed Under: business method patents, canada, patents, software, software patents

Advocacy Group Says Canadian ISPs Should Be Required To Hand Over Subscriber Data Without A Warrant

from the unintended-consequences,-anyone? dept

Rob Hyndman points us to the news that a Canadian "victims advocacy group" called Victims of Crime has put out a report on how the government should deal with "internet-facilitated child sexual abuse." You should recognize that the recommendations are ridiculous by the way they describe the problem: "internet-facilitated child sexual abuse." Notice that they're including the internet as a part of the problem, rather than just a tool that's being used. The report starts off by making a bad assumption: that the internet is responsible for an increase in child sexual abuse by stating: "internet-facilitated child sexual abuse is growing at an alarming rate. Between 1998 and 2003, the number of charges for production or distribution of child pornography increased by 900 percent...." Now, that could mean that there has been an increase... or it could mean that more resources have been put towards lawsuits or (perhaps) that the internet has enabled law enforcement to collect more evidence to bring charges. In other words, you could easily interpret that evidence to mean that the internet has been an amazing help in bringing justice to those involved in such evil acts.

But where the report gets really troubling is the suggestions on what the government should do:

• introducing legislation to make it mandatory for Internet service providers to give law enforcement basic customer name and address information upon request;
• requiring internet service providers to keep data and internet surfing records for longer periods to ensure that evidence is not destroyed; and
• making it a criminal offence to refuse to give law enforcement a password or encryption information during an investigation.

In other words, throw all privacy rights out the window, don't require any evidence of wrongdoing or a court warrant and massively increase the costs for ISPs. And do they not think such laws would be abused? If police can simply request detailed information with no oversight, how quickly will it be abused to seek out anonymous detractors? Law enforcement and politicians have tried to seek out anonymous commenters many times, but usually a court is there to try to protect the right to anonymity and privacy. Yes, it's no doubt that child sexual abuse is a horrific crime and we're all for law enforcement doing whatever they can to crack down on it. But throwing out all privacy rights or due process is likely to have many, many, many negative unintended consequences.

Filed Under: canada, isps, law enforcement, privacy, warrants

Former Conference Board Author Explains How Lobbyists Influenced Plagiarized Reports

from the well,-there's-that... dept

Wow. If you thought that the whole saga with the deceptive and plagiarized reports about intellectual property in Canada was over, when The Conference Board of Canada recalled the reports and admitted that they were both plagiarized and not up to research standards, think again. One of the named authors of the report is now speaking out to reveal some of the behind the scenes details. Now, he's only giving one side, but if his version of the events is true, it's incredibly damning of the Conference Board. Basically, he says that he wrote a very, very different research report last year, and handed it over in late August. He had already quit to take another job, but had finished up his research. However, months later, he received phone calls from both The Conference Board and some of the IP lobbyists who funded the research to complain about what the research said (impartial? non-biased?). Since he was no longer employed, he figured it was none of his business, but he implies that in response to these calls, the Conference Board appears to have replaced much of what he wrote with the plagiarized snippets from the lobbyist's own reports... but left his name on the report as an author. He's not happy:

• I was a full-time employee with the Conference Board between September 2007 and July 2008. I resigned almost a year ago to take a fulfilling job with a non-profit in British Columbia.
• I submitted draft research to my former supervisor for the IP reports in mid-August 2008. I finished the research after I moved even though I was neither on salary nor on contract with the Board.
• The research I submitted did NOT include the controversial passages or plagiarized content.
• I worked with three contract researchers on this project between April 2008 and June 2008, including Jeremy deBeer, whose work I integrated into the draft. These researchers did not submit research that included the controversial/plagiarized content.
• I had no involvement in any content changes and did not see these papers after I submitted them in August.
• My new work was interrupted in mid-September by my former supervisor at the Conference Board to tell me there had been “push back” from one of the funding clients about the research and inclusion of Mr. deBeer’s contribution. I had quit almost two months earlier so this was of no concern to me.
• Around the same time, my new work was also interrupted by a call from one of the funding clients who expressed similar concerns. Again, I informed him that I no longer had anything to do with these reports.
• I received news of its publication on May 26, 2009, ten months after my resignation. I downloaded and read the research after I was informed of the controversy and was alarmed to see the direction it had taken.
• I sent my letter to Anne Golden the following day.
• The VP of Public Policy e-mailed me on May 29th to ask for my assistance in finding both researchers who could "fix" the reports, as well as external reviewers who would be impartial in reviewing the new work. His message stated that “I trust your judgment, experience and knowledge and would value your help.”

The Conference Board wants my help to fix reports that were published 10 months after my departure. It wants me to help fix publications that were re-written (and plagiarized) months after my departure and after they discarded the research I compiled and submitted. The Conference Board asks for my help but won't acknowledge that it was wrong to put my name on reports that bear little resemblance to the original research I submitted, were substantially reworked, and were published ten months after I resigned. After Anne Golden laid blame on contract researchers and supervisors late last week, I noticed two of the authors who still were listed on the organization's web site were no longer on the staff list.

If true, this is all pretty damning, and raises serious questions about how The Conference Board of Canada created this report, as well as its impartial nature as a research institute. It's no secret that many research firms are accused of producing reports that favor the funders of those reports -- but to specifically toss out contrary results and replace them with the funders' own text goes beyond even what many "pay for the research results you want" type firms normally do.

Filed Under: bias, canada, copyright, plagiarism
Companies: the conference board of canada

Canadian Copyright Expert On Levy Proposals: Today's Quickie Legislative Solutions Are Tomorrow's Absurdities

from the $2500-iPod dept

Howard Knopf, a well known Canadian copyright expert, recently took a look at some of the failed copyright levy proposals in Canada. The Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) administers the tax levy on blank CDs, which now accounts for almost 90% of the price. In 2002, similar proposals to extend the levy to DVDs and digital audio players were shot down. It's a good thing they were! Knopf notes that the $2.27 levy proposed in 2002 is now about 10 times the retail price of a blank DVD, and the $21/GB levy proposed for digital audio players would have left a 120 GB iPod (<$300 CAD) with a $2520 tax. You might think the CPCC would have decreased the levies over time, but the blank CD levy was just increased this past December (blank CDs cost more in Canada than blank DVDs). Even if the levies were lowered, it would be because they had already become unbearable. Imagine the bureaucracy and battles at the Copyright Board, and imagine the effect on Canadian consumers, tech companies in the meantime (what if the Blackberry was classified as a digital audio device?).

The point is that these quick solutions aren't solutions at all. Setting up "you're a criminal" taxes to collect money for companies that can't figure out how to adjust their business models is bound to block innovative new technologies, and you can't predict what technologies will drive new business models. As Knopf puts it, "all of this shows that today's quickie proposed legislative solutions and oft inflated tariff proposals to deal with supposedly serious crises arising from copyright and new technology are potentially tomorrows' absurdities or even nightmares."

Filed Under: canada, copyright, ipods, levy

BSA's Canadian Piracy Numbers Based On Hunches, Not Actual Surveys

from the bogus-stats-as-always dept

For years, we've been raising questions about the incredibly bogus stats the BSA puts out every year. There are so many problems with them it's incredible that the group continues to release them each year... and much worse that the press and politicians quote them as if they're factual. However, Michael Geist has discovered that they're even worse than originally thought. In digging deeper into the questionable claims of the report by The Conference Board of Canada that was basically a cut and paste from various industry groups, Geist noticed that the report relied on some BSA data. So he asked for more info on how the BSA determined the "piracy" rate of software in Canada. How many people were surveyed? What was the methodology?

In response, Geist found out that no one in Canada was surveyed, and BSA (and IDC who created the report) simply made an educated guess, assuming the piracy rates weren't all that different than they were in past years. Yet this hunch, based on no actual data, is being used as a definitive source of piracy numbers in Canada? Even more noteworthy, both the BSA and The Conference Board report use these numbers to support the silly claim that Canada is somehow one of the worst offenders when it comes to supporting "piracy." But what was the reason for not surveying companies in Canada?

"Countries that are included in the survey portion are chosen to represent the more volatile economies. IDC has found from past research that low piracy countries, generally mature markets, have stable software loads by segment, with yearly variations driven more by segment dynamics (e.g. consumer shipment versus business shipments of PCs) than by load-by-load segment."

So... just to get this straight. IDC doesn't bother to survey Canadians about software piracy, because it considers Canada to be a "low piracy" country. So it just makes up the number... and then the BSA, other lobbyists, research groups, the press and politicians (including the US Trade Representative) use these made up numbers to support the claims that Canada is a high piracy country. Doesn't that seem like fraud?

Filed Under: canada, copyright, piracy, plagiarism, stats
Companies: bsa, idc, the conference board

Canadian Report On IP Not Just Deceptive... But Plagiarized

from the oops dept

Once again, we're seeing a report or person pushing for stronger IP laws that seems to feel that it's fine if they cut some corners. Michael Geist has the story of a report from The Conference Board of Canada, which describes itself as "the foremost, independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada. Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests." Except... when the money's good. It's latest report, backed by a bunch of copyright lobbyists and the gov't of Ontatio (taxpayer money!) isn't just deceptive but appears to plagiarize widely from other already debunked reports, without a hint of skepticism or independent thought. Instead, it appears to have simply cut & pasted certain sections. While plagiarism and copyright are two separate issues, they are related in some ways -- and it's rather stunning that a report complaining about mass piracy in Canada would plagiarize large sections. But, even worse, of course, is the claim that this is from an independent group with no lobbying interests, when the plagiarized sections were written by lobbyists. Whatever credibility The Conference Board of Canada had (and apparently it's a well-respected organization), it just lost a bunch of it. Meanwhile, The Conference Board insists that it's standing by the report and only made a minor mistake in how it cited the info used in its report. Of course, that's not quite true. It didn't clearly quote the sections it copied, nor did it do any work to confirm whether that information was correct or simply repeated what the lobbyists who hired the company had already written elsewhere.

Filed Under: canada, copyright, plagiarism
Companies: the conference board of canada

Canadian Insurance Company Snooped On Jurors Insurance Claims During Trial

from the that-seems-bad dept

We've seen it over and over again -- when people have access to large databases of information, it's almost impossible for them to resist the temptation to abuse the info. The latest example comes via Michael Scott, who points us to the news that the Insurance Corporation of B.C. (ICBC) was caught checking its own database to examine the claim histories of potential jurors in a trial in which the company was involved. Not surprisingly, this is a massive breach of Canadian privacy laws and also raises questions about the jury itself. The judge in the case is now trying to find out if ICBC has done this in other cases as well. ICBC seems to be bending over backwards to say this won't happen again and that it's put in place safeguards, but it's not clear why it happened in the first place.

Filed Under: canada, insurance, jury, snooping
Companies: icbc

Canadian Parliament Threatens People For Posting Video Of Proceedings Online

from the how-dare-you-want-transparency dept

It would appear that the Canadian Parliament is no big fan of transparency. When some activists started posting video and audio of various Parliamentary committee proceedings online, in order to both increase transparency and to comment on those proceedings, lawyers apparently sent them a cease and desist, claiming it was "contempt of Parliament." They've also been sending takedowns to YouTube and other video hosting sites, claiming that this content is somehow proprietary, covered by "crown copyright" (something, thankfully, we don't have in the US) and subject to severe licensing restrictions. While it sounds like some Canadian politicians recognize the need to change, in the meantime, they're making a travesty of any sense of governmental openness.

Filed Under: canada, crown copyright, openness, parliament, transparency

Canadian Judge Says No To Cameras In The Courtroom... But Okays Twitter

from the connecting-to-the-outside-world dept

It seems like a popular topic in 2009 is how modern technology is opening up public access to courtrooms... if only judges would allow it. We've had numerous stories about things like Twitter and webcasting from a courtroom. To date, most stories are about judges banning as much as possible, but Michael Geist points out that in a case up in Canada a judge has barred television cameras, but allowed Twitter. Of course, since the specifics of the ruling do allow mobile devices to gather and disseminate news... what about someone using the camera on their mobile phone to stream the proceedings? That's not the same as a full sized TV camera that the judge rejected...

Filed Under: cameras, canada, courtroom, twitter
Companies: twitter