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In cases where the company is breaking Canadian law, contract language to force arbitration in California is null and void. A class action about “Sponsored Stories”, which uses the name and picture of a customer "without consent for the purposes of advertising" will go forward.

The legalese is summarized at http://www.slaw.ca/2017/06/28/... and the full case is https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/s...

It's primarily an arguement about choice of forum (country) in a contract.

No, then you're giving away too much information.

"I want my lawyer" and "Am I free to go?"

Note that in Canada, it's different. We'd invoke Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can still be compelled by statute to answer, but those answers can't then be used against you.

http://www.slaw.ca/2011/10/07/...

I depend critically on copyright to protect my book income, and am a good-faith plaintiff (via my publisher), but we do not have a credible reason to go after people who download individual copies. In fact, we make copies of "Using Samba (O'Reilly) available with every copy of the samba program.

The people I worry about are professional crooks, who print pallet-loads of the book and sell them cheap. Ditto unauthorized translators, because I don't get royalties for massive quantities of books. Historically, publishers like mine have been able to use the courts in their traditional form and file individual suits to stop unauthorized printings.

To get value from grandma (assuming she's a sysadmin grandma) we make the book available on-line, as part of a subscription service. This allows us to benefit from her just wanting to refer to it for a few days, or wanting to print out the section from Chapter 3 on setting up XP. She knows she can find it in the samba download, but it's easier to spend a few dollars and save the time. Just like it's worth the price of a professionally-printed book that she can make notes in, put yelow stickes on and read in the bathtub.

Class actions are a relatively new development, and were originally permitted so as to allow large numbers of individual plaintiffs to band together to sue a single malefactor. Allowing a single plaintiff to sue very large numbers of possible malefactors is unusual. The courts are suspicious of it, and wonder if it is legitimate to sue more than one grandma for $8,000, or even $100, for a blue-ray that costs $8.00 Canadian on Amazon (down from $20.99)

The balance between an honest plaintiff and one engaging in "speculative invoicing" is the subject of learned debate amoung the legal profession in Canada: for a non-learned discussion, see http://www.slaw.ca/2013/01/16/... I had the honour of editing this GTALUG submission to the larger debate.

So, to answer your question, I'm not comfortable asking Grandma for any money after the fact. I want her to go to Amazon, pay $8.00 up front and stream a legitimate copy of the movie. If I find a publisher making it available for $2.00 who isn't paying me royalties, I'll sue them.

Sure: http://www.slaw.ca/2013/07/30/...

Reaching a Proper Balance
by "Abe Edric", guest blogger

Editor’s note: What follows is unique on Slaw, in that it is a pseudonymous post. We have entertained many pseudonymous comments, but not a column or blog entry. I do not expect this rarity to be repeated. The writer is a Canadian public sector litigator who prefers to remain anonymous to emphasize that the views expressed are not purported to be those of his employer. His identity is known to me. The writer and I are aware of the irony in writing pseudonymously about a government spying on its citizens...

[In part from a reply to http://www.slaw.ca/2013/04/04/access-to-server-data-for-foreign-criminal-investigative-purposes/ at Slaw]

The U.S. requests under our Mutual Law Assistance Treaties for private information re Megaupload parallels the CISPA proposals, and both strike me as wrong-headed (;-)) It is arguably valid for such a process to be followed in cases of copyright infringement, and can be critiqued on the basis of whether it is necessary and sufficient.

However, it suggest that at least the U.S. government is trying to deal with a minor crime, copyright infringement, because they don't know how to deal with major ongoing ones, commercial espionage.

Real "computer crime"is centred around breaking in to people's machines to steal data or crash them to deny the data to its owners. This is done via viruses, root-kits and the like, communicating across the internet to "bot-nets", collections of machines used as accomplices and cut-outs. These in turn are run by "bot master" machines in the hands of the criminals.

To investigate a key-logger (snooping) virus running on the machine of your chief counsel, you need to trace the connections across the internet from the infected machine to the "bot" and thence to the master. This requires cooperation of the police in the jurisdictions where the machines are and the ISPs they are connected to, to trace the connections between machines. To the best of my knowledge, that is barely in discussion at ICANN, and is nowhere part of the law or practice.

Only once that is done does one need to identify persons, and only one person, the criminal operating the master, and seize the machine for evidence, possibly in a foreign country.

All the other human beings in the story are victims, whom we do not need to identify, but merely transmit a warning to via their ISP. Once we have seized the master machine, we know the IP addresses (and ISPs) of the people who are being attacked, and the IP addresses of the people whose machines have been taken over by viruses to become the bot-net. Without breaching confidentiality, an ISP can forward a message that they are infected by a criminal's virus, and in extreme cases require the machine to be cleaned of infectious before being allowed to connect to the ISPs other customers.

I'm just a bit horrified at our American cousins: right now, people are stealing corporate information, collecting credit-card numbers and sabotaging centrifuges using techniques that neither the police, legislators nor courts are paying any attention to. Instead they are prosecuting a drop-box operator for a misdemeanor.

They remind me of the story of the drunk looking for his car-keys under the street-light, instead of in the dark garage where he dropped them.

–dave

The proper course of action would have been for them to line up equally (apparently) qualified academicians on their side of the argument and let the book-buying institutions decide for themselves. It would seem that both sides of the argument were already being hashed out on the blog, and now arrives The Streisand Effect in spades!

It would appear that this company's reputation is already well pretty. well established

The nicest thing I have seen so far are the comments that say it is just one step above a vanity press.

Tek Savvy is doing notice and notice, as per the (new) law, and put one notice on their blog.

Rogers and Bell have been and still are being very close-mouthed about any suits. So far as I know, they do not now and did not in the past do notice-and-notice. In particular I found out about the York University "Norwich Order" against Bell through York and the Slaw legal blog: see http://www.slaw.ca/2009/09/15/york-university-v-bell-canada-enterprises-observations-and-implications-for-future-norwich-jurisprudence/

--dave

Every article has the same content, and links back to a post media story. I haven't been able to find a press release, and the case doesn't have a citation, so it looks like a "placed" story, to offset the limits on copyright infringement suits imposed by bill C-11.

Generally, one has to commence a suit, then go to court and ask for an order, addressed to a particular ISP, to obtain contact information for specific customers. Otherwise you need an extraordinary remedy, a so-called Norwich order (see Slaw, http://www.slaw.ca/2009/09/15/york-university-v-bell-canada-enterprises-observations-and-implications-for-future-norwich-jurisprudence/)

This suggests that someone was hired to find a group of downloaders in BC, all using the same large ISP, and went after them. This could possibly work elsewhere, since the two big ISPs are Bell and Rogers, and there are enough customers of each to be consider risking the cost of filing a suit against 10 gadzillion john does, and convincing a court that you're for real. The amount you'll recover is limited, but if you amortize it over enough people, you might make a profit.

It would be better to get the contact details and then send a bill-collector after each of them, as you could probably frighten some of them into buying you off and signing a non-disclosure. That's a well-known trick in the U.S. It's not obvious if it would work in Canada.

Were I the company doing this, I'd want financial guarantees from the companies employing me, and the right to keep all the fines and not remit them to to my clients, the copyright holders. Here too, it's not obvious if a lawyer could do that in Canada...

--dave

Of course, it always was (;-)) Hyperlinks were invented for footnotes and case citations.

For a quick look, see What's hot on CanLII This Week. I love the Leroy Smickle case described there (go to then end of the case link for the link array )

In literature, of course, they're pretty much a done fad.

--dave

Doe v. XYC Corp. New Jersey Appellate Division, No. A-2909-04T2, 12/27/05

Some places, you can even go to jail for not reporting it:

I'm not going to jail for people who can't check their libido at the door.

Bad drafting can be expensive. Here's a bit of the 'million dollar comma' story from a few years ago:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061026/185156.shtml

"... basing the ruling on just the comma alone (a comma which we doubt the original lawyers really paid attention to at the beginning). However, the story is about to get a lot more interesting. Rogers is appealing, and they claim that they have a second version of the contract written in French that makes it much clearer that the purpose of the original clause is ..."

That appeal in the end succeeded--because the French version of the contract was unambiguous:
http://www.slaw.ca/2007/08/22/rogers-wins-comma-contract-dispute-with-bell-aliant/

The teaching moment can be taking someone's ambiguous text, that could have been read three or four different ways, each of which would have different consequences if someone signed that agreement -- and breaking out each possible meaning, then asking the writer whether any of those alternatives captures the intended sense.

Good writers will know which one they meant. Those who don't even know, well, it's a new age, man.