E-TIPS

On a summary motion, a US District Court Judge in Minnesota has found that an employer was not negligent when an employee's laptop computer containing a customer's personal information was stolen from his home, and further found that there was no duty to see that the personal data was encrypted.

Officials from 113 countries met in Geneva in early February at the first session of the Conference of the Parties to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (Convention). The Convention, which came into force a year ago, bans advertising, promotion and sponsorship of tobacco products, blamed for millions of early deaths annually.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced on February 16, 2006 that $625.7 million, the proceeds of excess billings of telephone customers, would be used to fund the expansion of broadband services to under-served markets, primarily rural and remote communities, and to facilitate access to services by disabled customers. The excess billings were the result of a 2002 CRTC decision which, in order to allow telcos to recoup costs in attracting new entrants and encourage competition, allowed telcos to set telephone rates higher than necessary. The telcos were required to place the additional revenue in deferral accounts. It is these deferral accounts that were in issue.

The privacy commissioners of Canada, Alberta and British Columbia have agreed to conduct a joint probe into the long-standing requirement that Canadian students must provide a thumbprint when writing the ubiquitous law school entrance exam, known as the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT). The probe is the first-ever joint action by Canadian privacy commissioners and will investigate the practices of the administrator of the LSAT, the US-based Law School Admission Council (LSAC), during a period when the existence of the USA Patriot Act has heightened fears of outsourcing personal information across borders.

India has launched an ambitious, multilingual project to protect centuries-old traditional knowledge from foreign patent claimants. Christened the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, the project will be a massive digital encyclopedia of herbal remedies, indigenous architecture and construction techniques, Indian foods, yoga exercises and other ancient lore.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has rejected an application by German company SiSi-Werke (S-W) to register a three-dimensional shape as a trade-mark. S-W tried to register eight marks for the shape of stand-up pouches for packaging drinks, including the flexible pouch for Capri-Sun, a product which had been distributed in Europe for 20 years. The registrations were refused by the European Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (Trade Marks and Designs).

The idea of charging postage for e-mail in order to combat spam has been around for several years. The principle is simple: reduce unwanted e-mail messages by sucking some of the profit from their transmission. Spammers worldwide send billions of messages each day, only the smallest percentage of which get a response. Since it costs next to nothing to send an e-mail, spammers profit, despite the low response rate. However, if each e-mail cost ¼ of a cent to send, then the transmission of a billion e-mails would cost 2.5 million dollars, which would sharply reduce spammers' profits.

While some Canadian provinces (BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland) have enacted statutory torts of invasion of privacy, Ontario has not. Nevertheless, a judge of the Ontario Superior Court recently concluded that the time has come to recognize invasion of privacy as a common law tort in that province.

Companies tracking cellular telephone locations in the UK have recently seen an explosion of interest by employers wishing to track employees and vehicles. Now companies can be alerted if employees are caught in traffic - or at the golf course - and can re-route resources more efficiently to handle sudden demand. Although tracking by trucking companies has existed for some time through GPS systems, the comparatively low cost of mobile-phone tracking now makes this benefit more widely available.

As China continues to filter free speech on the Internet, using a variety of methods to present a sanitized version of the worldwide web to its citizens, concern has been voiced over the involvement of North American Internet companies. In effect, China has set up a "Great Firewall of China" and has arrested dissidents who post subversive comments, such as tales of government corruption.

In entirely unrelated circumstances, governments on both sides of the US/Canada border have recently attempted to gain access to databases containing customer data in the hands of private companies.

With increased interest in the potential for nanotechnology products – and the fact that some are actually now in production – a newly published report (PEN Report) by the Washington-based Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies discusses the question whether regulation of the field is required in the public interest. The PEN Report, Managing the Effects of Nanotechnology, and authored by Clarence Davies, notes that most statutes or programs do not address the fact that nanomaterials (matter measured by a number of nanometers, or one millionth of a millimeter) behave differently from materials of ordinary size. Says the PEN Report,

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal by eBay Inc (eBay et al v MercExchange LLC, No 05-130) and will consider the issue of the availability of permanent injunctions in patent infringement cases.

In a case before the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in which documents to be produced formed part of a larger database and the printing of them would cost $50,000 in copying fees, a Master of the Court has directed the parties to consider electronic discovery.

A new version of iTunes, released in mid-January, raised concern from privacy advocates when it was found that the software was sending information about computer users' playlists back to its supplier, Apple Computer Inc (Apple).

After successive failures by the US government in New York, Texas and Maryland courts to obtain cell phone tracking without judicial warrant, the government has prevailed. In late December, for the first time the Department of Justice (DOJ) obtained an order from Judge Gabriel Gorenstein, a magistrate in the Southern District of New York, permitting the tracking of cell phone use without the necessity of first showing probable cause of criminal activity.

Earlier this year, the federal government proposed draft guidelines (E-TIPS®, Vol 3, No 18, February 10, 2005) intended to safeguard against the unauthorized disclosure of personal information by service providers subject to the laws of foreign jurisdictions. Now released under the title "Taking Privacy into Account Prior to Making Contracting Decisions" (Guidelines), the draft Guidelines suggest that federal departments need to adopt more stringent measures to protect personal information in their custody and control.

After an extended period of contesting her massive cellphone bill for unauthorized charges, a law professor at York University in Toronto has apparently settled her dispute with Rogers Wireless (Rogers). According to a newspaper report, the cellphone in question had been stolen and then used to make over 350 calls to foreign countries such as Pakistan, Libya and Syria. It appeared that Rogers' fraud detection software (which notes dramatic changes in calling patterns) did not trigger a shutdown of the phone in question. At first, Rogers insisted that the customer would have to pay for the unauthorized calls. The law professor contested the charges and filed suit in Small Claims Court.

Ontario's health privacy legislation has been declared substantially similar to the Canadian federal privacy standards. This was confirmed in the Health Information Custodians in the Province of Ontario Exemption Order, which has exempted health information custodians from the application of Part 1 of the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in respect of the collection, use and disclosure of personal information that occurs within Ontario and is based on the substantially similarity between the Ontario Personal Health Information Protection Act, 2004 and PIPEDA.

The Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) has released a report that appears to show that while Canada ranks better than half way up the league tables of OECD countries in investment in the information and communications technologies (ICT) sector, vis-à-vis the United States, its principal trading partner, Canada is investing much less, both in terms of ICT dollars invested per worker and of ICT invested as a share of GDP. The 120-page report, entitled "What Explains the Canada-US ICT Investment Intensity Gap?" (Report) was prepared by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards.