Interesting warning regarding filesharing

[Herb Richter]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Noah John Gellner wrote:
[cut]
> In civil cases the courts in Ontario have a test that they apply to
> see which location is suitable for the case. I don't have the cite
> handy, but they have explicitly said that they would enforce the laws
> of outside jurisdictions whether that jursidiction be B.C. or
> Kentucky. When I was learning it, it struck me as weird, but this is
> the way it is.

Would that citation be: Braintech, Inc, v. Kostuik 1999 BCCA 0169 (1999)?
	http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/ca/99/01/c99-0169.txt

I remember this case in the context of comity, forum shopping and the
Morguard test (real and substantial connection) and especially in that the
BC Court of Appeals overturned a Texas District Court award of $US300,000.

Not having read the whole text of the appeal until now, I wasn't aware
that the Canadian court considered a *lot* of American law (i.e. the Texas
long arm statute and the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution).  But it
does seem to me that this was done in the context of Canadian laws.


As a lay-person who takes a keen interest in legal issues that may affect
my business, I find cases like this very interesting but in this case, not
scary.  Sure it seems that not only can someone doing business on the
internet be haled into almost any court anywhere, and that we may be
subject to many different versions of the laws at the same time, I guess I
just have a lot of faith that the law is a lot smarter than it may
sometimes appear.


Nor am I particularly alarmed at the original post re the "Interesting
warning regarding filesharing", from what I recall of that post (I
don't have the original).

I don't think it was mentioned if the recipient of that letter (the
client) is an individual or a business.  Esp. if a business, there is
probably a business solution apart from any legal solution i.e. "What can
we do to fix this?" as opposed to "What can we do to fight this?"

There may even be a business opportunity.  Lets say that the client is
an ISP who really doesn't like the bandwidth consumed, then forwarding a
copy of the letter to the file sharers may serve two purposes: bandwidth
and doing something to fix this.

Further more, again from what I can remember of the original post, it
sounded more like a scare mongering just as in the tv ads.  And if this
does reduce the filesharing bandwidth then maybe "that's a good thing"
:-)

-- 

        Herb Richter  <hgr-FjoMob2a1F7QT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org>
        Toronto, Ontario
        http://PartsAndService.com
        http://PartsAndService.ca







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