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A letter was sent today on behalf of coalition comprised of 83 leading organizations and experts from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States to their respective governments in reaction to renewed state calls for measures that would effectively weaken encryption. The letter responds to a ministerial meeting of the five governments' respective security officials hosted in Ottawa earlier this week, where possibilities for facilitating increased state access to encrypted data were discussed.

The ministerial occurred under the auspices of the 'Five Eyes' - a surveillance partnership between intelligence agencies within the five countries, including Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE). It generated a joint Communique, which presented encryption as a serious barrier to public safety efforts and an impediment to state agencies wishing to access the content of some communications for investigative reasons.

The coalition letter, which was organized by Access Now, CIPPIC, and researchers from Citizen Lab, called on the Five Eye governments to "respect the right to use and develop strong encryption" while urging broader public participation in future discussions such as the one that occurred earlier this week. Strong and uncompromised encryption has never been more important, as it protects our most sensitive data, our increasingly critical online interactions, even the integrity of our elections.

In a 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Douez v Facebook, Inc. 2017 SCC 33, that Facebook’s efforts in its terms of service to require Canadians to pursue grievances with Facebook in California courts instead of Canadian courts is unenforceable.

The case involved a class action against Facebook alleging violations of BC's Privacy Act. The class action could not proceed, however, as Facebook argued that its terms of service require disputes to be resolved in California courts and under California law. Historically, the Supreme Court of Canada's jurisprudence favoured enforcement of these “forum selection clauses” on the rationale that holding sophisticated commercial parties to their jurisdictional choices advances the underlying principles that private international law seeks to achieve.

Today marks the launch of the 2017 Google Policy Fellowship (Canada), which will host a Google Policy Fellow at each of Canada's two leading technology research and policy centres - CIPPIC and the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto. CIPPIC's Google Policy Fellow will join our Summer Internship Program and work closely with CIPPIC staff on a range of dynamic, cutting edge law & technology issues as we seek to further our public interest mandate. This includes helping to formulate strategy, conducting research and analysis, and drafting submissions to various levels of court, political and legislative venues, and regulatory bodies. Substantively, CIPPIC advocacy covers a diverse range of digital rights/policy issues, including copyright, privacy/electronic surveillance, telecommunications regulation/net neutrality, online consumer protection, online speech, access to knowledge and more general Internet governance concerns. CIPPIC is strongly committed to a diverse environment, and in particular encourages applications from racialized persons / persons of colour, women, Indigenous / Aboriginal People of North America, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ persons, and others who will enrich our discourse by ensuring it is the product of a diversity of perspectives.

The policy fellow will also participate in our Summer Speaker Series, which brings leading experts in Canadian law & technology fields in to discuss various pressing issues with our students in a closed environment. See past annual bulletins for a list of past speakers, as well as a description of some of our work. Applications are due Friday, April 28, 2017. The fellowship will run for 10 weeks this summer and is open to any law students or law graduate students, with specific times and dates to be coordinated with the host organization. Application details are available at: https://cippic.ca/jobs/google_policy_fellowship_canada_2017.

The Federal Court of Canada has found that obtaining, reading and distributing paywalled articles for the purposes of assessing and responding to the contents of those articles constituted fair dealing under the Copyright Act.

In a tightly drafted judgement, Justice Barnes found that the Finance Department employees exercised their fair dealing rights for research purposes in receiving a pair of articles from a Blacklock's subscriber, and reading and sharing those articles internally with other Department employees.  Justice Barnes rejected Blacklock's arguments that its terms of use barred such dealing, noting that it was not Blacklock's practice to explicitly bring such terms to the attention of users, and, in any event, those terms contained an ambiguity permitting reproduction and distribution for non-commercial, personal or educational purposes.

Given the outcome of its fair dealing analysis, Justice Barnes saw no need to address the Government's claim that Blacklock's practices constituted copyright misuse, although he did note that there are "certainly some troubling aspects to Blacklock's business practices".  The Court awarded costs to the Government.