Canadian Technology & IP Law : Canadian Technology Lawyers & Attorneys : Stikeman Elliott Law Firm : IP Law in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Ottawa & Vancouver

In a judgment released last week, the Ontario Court of Appeal held that the appellant teacher had a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to personal files stored on his work laptop. Specifically, R. v. Cole involved the discovery of nude images of a student on the appellant's laptop by the school's computer technician. The technician copied the images onto a disk for the school's principal and subsequently copied temporary internet files found in the laptop's browsing history onto another disk.

According to the Court,

[a]lthough this was a work computer owned by the school board and issued for employment purposes with access to the school network, the school board gave the teachers possession of the laptops, explicit permission to use the laptops for personal use and permission to take the computers home on evenings, weekends and summer vacation. The teachers used their computers for personal use, they employed passwords to exclude others from their laptops, and they stored personal information on their hard drives. There was no clear and unambiguous policy to monitor, search or police the teachers’ use of their laptops.

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David Elder -

The Supreme Court of Canada has announced that it will hear an important “convergence” case respecting regulatory treatment of Internet access to broadcasting content.

On March 24, the Court granted leave to appeal last summer’s judgement of the Federal Court of Appeal, which found that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) do not carry on “broadcasting undertakings”, within the meaning of the Broadcasting Act, when they provide access through the Internet to broadcasting material requested by users.

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David Elder -

“Free-to-air” local television signals may no longer be free to cable and satellite subscribers, following a recent court decision affirming the scope of the powers of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) under the Broadcasting Act.

In an important ruling that addresses the intersection of broadcasting and copyright law and policy, a majority of the Federal Court of Appeal found, in the case of Reference re the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2010-167 and Broadcasting Order CRTC 2010-168, 2011 FCA 64, that the Copyright Act permits the CRTC to limit the statutory retransmission rights of broadcasting distribution undertakings (BDUs), such as cable companies, by imposing any regulatory or licensing condition that is consistent with the Commission’s statutory authority under the Broadcasting Act. In fact, the majority went so far as to state that Parliament has ranked the objectives of Canada’s broadcasting policy ahead of the statutory retransmission rights granted to BDUs under the Copyright Act.

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