Entries Tagged 'Canada' ↓

from the Supreme Court of Canada: Top court rules ISPs not liable for royalties. “In a unanimous 9-0 decision, the court ruled that although ISPs provide the hardware and technology, they aren’t responsible for what people download. The court ruled that companies providing wide access to the web are ‘intermediaries’ who are not bound by federal copyright legislation.” I am going to study the text of the decision to see if they used the term “common carrier” with respect to ISPs.

Accenture has been doing surveys of Government online initiatives for the past five years. In the latest report, Canada came out on top. You can access the report here: eGovernment Leadership: High Performance, Maximum Value. [via Ed Bilodeau]

In Canada we can’t yet use the iTunes Music Store, which is bad enough, the only legal download site is called Puretracks. Trouble is, when I go to the site I get the following message:

Thank you for visiting Puretracks.com
Currently our website supports Internet Explorer 5.0 and above on the
Windows operating system (Win 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP / 2003),
and is available to Canadian residents only.
We value our Mac audience, however the Windows Media player for the Mac
platform is not currently compatible with Microsoft protected audio content.
Puretracks is currently working to make our service available to Mac users.

There are several problems with this. First of all, saying you value an audience while locking them out is NOT valuing that audience. More importantly, though, I think the companies trying to make a go of online music that tie that effort to a proprietary platform are making a big mistake and can’t, in the long term, succeed with such a strategy. The encoding method used by Apple, on the other hand, is available to anyone who wishes to use it, with no approval or license required from Apple. Tying DRM to the encoding itself is a serious conceptual mistake that a lot of people are making, and no matter how many companies signed up to play in the Microsoft sandbox I don’t think they can do well.

that has blanketed Montreal since yesterday has made me really happy to have bought snow tires this year after two winters on all-season radials! It was really suprising to wake up this morning and realize that yesterday’s 5 or 10 cm had grown overnight in a big way, and that brushing off the car had been replaced by shoveling out the car.

began hearing a case about music downloads on the internet today. The question is whether ISPs should be responsible for the royalties to copyright holders of material downloaded on the net. Something worth following, as any ISP would be liable to any Canadian copyright holder. Or so people have been saying today.

noticed that the Handspring Treo is available now in Canada, from Rogers. The price is enough to make you think not twice but three or four times, but nonetheless…