Marcelo Thompson

My last post discussed the vagueness-precision dichotomy in light of Canadian copyright reform. Ironically, the matter resurfaces today, now in the UK. IPKat brings news on the Higgs case, in which Neil Higgs, also known as “MrModchips“, escaped conviction arguably because of the complexities of English copyright law.

Osgoode Hall Prof Pina D’Agostino has published a sensible column on Bill C-61 in the Toronto Star. Much unlike Bill C-61, her message was clear — we need to police our tone to offer a sober academic perspective on Canadian copyright reform — as she advocated legal intervention to balance the interests of users, owners, [...]

Revisiting Kathy Bowrey’s insightful Law & Internet Cultures I noticed that she opens the book with an intriguing remark about IETF RFCs. She notes that RFC 2026 prompts IETF technical standards to be “designed to help facilitate best practice in terms of [inter alia] fairness”. This is a powerful assertion. But is it right?

Brazil has entered the 21st century making clear choices with regard to some core technological matters and reflecting these choices in an objective political framework. [1] Those core matters were authentication technologies, software licensing, and digital inclusion. The choices were for an authentication technologies framework based on a national public key infrastructure in which the [...]

:: Download in PDF :: It sounds fairly eloquent to say that Internet Service Providers should not discriminate packages of data according to their source, content, or destination, and to call this network “neutrality”. It seems almost as a truism, which everyone who cares for the value of openness deems to be self-evident. Dare to [...]

Professor Michael Geist has just published his first impressions on what I hope does not become a Canadian version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Bill C-61 was tabled today by Industry Minister Jim Prentice and seems to have provisions much worse than those of its inpiring statute. I am yet to read [...]

Did you know that Public Procurement corresponds to 16% of the European Union’s GDP? Did you know that, much more than being distant bureaucratic rituals for purchasing goods and services, public procurement processes actually enable the achievement of several public policy goals within the internal market? In spite of that, few are the intergovernmental initiatives [...]

The Brazilian Superior Court of Labour (TST) has just come to issue a curious decision on privacy expectations and “taste” in matters concerning labour relationships. In a nutshell, reaffirming earlier decisions, the court basically denied any reasonable expectation of privacy that someone may hold with regard to the use of a corporative e-mail account. However, [...]