Alex Reid

California’s Appeals Court ruled that Internet bloggers have the same legal protection that traditional journalists have.

The ruling came after Apple had successfully argued in a lower court that the publishers of Power Page and Apple Insider be forced to reveal their sources, with Intel Corporation backing Apple in court after they published an “exclusive” account of a new Apple product that they claimed to be in development.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which fought the case for the three online journalists who had seen information which Apple maintained they shouldn’t have seen. Apple wanted them to spill the beans about their sources. Apple went even so far to try to subpoena the bloggers’ email service provider, without luck. The subpeona couldn’t be enforced as that would violate United States’ Stored Communications Act.

The case started to wain for Apple in September 2005, after it was suggested that Apple failed to internally investigate the leak before initiating legal action. In California, companies like Apple can only subpoena journalists after having conducted their own thorough in-house investigation.

“The First Amendment requires that compelled disclosure from journalists be a last resort,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “Apple must first investigate its own house before seeking to disturb the freedom of the press.”

In response, Apple had attempted to argue that their internal investigatory procedures were also trade secrets, but the judges didn’t buy it and challenged the adequacy of Apple’s internal investigation.

In the end, the judges made little distinction between online journalists and traditional journalists.

“Does Walter Cronkite stop being a journalist if he blogs for the Huffington Post (an online news site)?” Opsahl said. “What makes a journalist a journalist is not the format. If you’re engaged in journalism, you’re a journalist. You have to look beyond the medium selected.”

Interesting article from last week’s Toronto Star.

I doubt the claim that it cost $1 million to upkeep over a thousand domain names. It’s one thing to tell Revenue Canada that, but office supplies and rent have nothing to do with virtual copyright purchases.

As I posted on May 1, Yellow Pages is making the jump from dead trees to the net. This article tells us that the group paid $2.5 million for 389 domain names.

Internet address owners get payday
`Dot-ca brand’ finally in demand
May 17, 2006. 11:36 AM
TYLER HAMILTON, BUSINESS REPORTER

In a little-noticed market where Internet addresses are routinely bought and sold, Peter Maxymych has been dubbed The Registration Machine.

Maxymych and business partner Harold Simpkins have spent the past decade registering more than 1,000 Canadian or “dot-ca” Web addresses in hopes that the properties — mostly generic addresses such as taxis.ca, doctors.ca and drugs-.ca — would pay off down the line.

Last week, after more than six years of persistence, the two online speculators finally got their payday.

Phone directory giant Yellow Pages Group surprised the Canadian Internet industry by announcing it had spent $2.5 million for 389 “domain names” owned by Maxymych’s Montreal-based firm, Emall.ca. The prize list includes maps.ca, autos.ca and attorneys.ca, all specific categories that Yellow Pages will use to expand the reach of its online directory business.

Maxymych calls the deal a watershed for Canada’s dot-ca market, which has been overshadowed over the years by the vastly more popular and higher-priced dot-com addresses, many having sold for millions of dollars apiece before the market collapsed in 2000.

“This is old hat in the United States,” said the 50-something businessman whose background is in real estate. “What’s happening now is people are starting to see the dot-ca extension as a very valuable one.”

It’s not like registration of dot-ca addresses hasn’t been growing. The number of Canadian domain names has jumped to more than 600,000 from about 100,000 six years ago, when the newly created Canadian Internet Registration Authority, or CIRA, took over management of the address database.

But that’s still tiny compared to the dot-com system, which claims 50.6 million registered addresses, or the dot-net and dot-org systems, which number 7.8 million and 4.8 million addresses, respectively.

While we may never see those numbers in an economy as small as Canada, Michael Geist, a technology lawyer and director on CIRA’s board, said the purchase by Yellow Pages provides a “strong signal” about the resale value of dot-ca domain names that, in the past, have attracted little interest.

It has been a long time coming. Maxymych and Simpkins, who teaches marketing at Concordia University, began accumulating generic dot-ca addresses as early as 1996, well before most Canadian companies and individuals knew how to register one.

They snapped up everything, including adult entertainment names callgirls.ca and porno.ca, and trademarked names victoriasecret.ca and montrealcanadiens.ca. At anywhere from $20 to $70 a year for registration, it didn’t come cheap. Maxymych estimated they’ve paid more than $1 million over the years to maintain rights to the names, including administrative and office expenses.

“With the money we put in there, there was this huge question mark of whether the value of the dot-ca brand would ever take off,” he said. “I can tell you, three years ago I was already getting fed up. I kept thinking, I’m a believer in this, but who else is?”

Controversy emerged in 2000 when a news story raised the fact that Emall.ca had registered a number of trademarked names for major U.S. businesses and dozens of professional sports teams. This led to accusations of “cybersquatting,” or registering a trademarked name to extort a high price from the company who holds the trademark.

Maxymych said there was never any intention of cybersquatting and that his team simply got carried away with the registration process.

After the media attention, Emall.ca immediately got rid of any Web address associated with a trademark.

Their original plan was to use the generic Web addresses they had acquired to build an online shopping mall — called Emall.ca — that would aggregate legitimate sites that focused exclusively on specific products. Some of those sites did emerge, including perfume.ca, lobsters.ca and cheaptickets.ca, but then the dot-com crash hit and Maxymych and Simpkins had to weather the storm.

“We had to just sit and wait until the market got better, until people recognized that we had valuable properties that can be developed,” said Maxymych.

“Yellow Pages is the first major company to recognize the value of primary, premium Canadian domain names. Now we’ve got other media companies interested from the U.S. and elsewhere asking us what other names we have.”

Answer: Hundreds and hundreds more.

Elliot Noss, chief executive officer of Tucows Inc., a Toronto-based Internet services company, said the dot-ca brand should grow stronger as Yellow Pages develops its new addresses.

“The fact that we’re going to see some number of important generic names in the dot-ca space get developed is a positive for the whole domain space,” Noss said.

I’m starting to like CIRA more and more. I received an invitation to a survey earlier. It seems that CIRA is expecting a surplus. The aren’t releasing any numbers, as far as I can find, but it sounds like a large profit. But because CIRA is a non-profit organization setup as a governing body under Industry Canada, it is not allowed to have a profit. It has in the past, held a growing surplus and in reaction, has edged the cost of .ca domain names lower and lower.

For CIRA members, .ca domain names only cost $8.50 now. Other traditional domain names like .com and .net only cost $4-5 per domain. But those are member prices, and ICANN (.com domains) memberships cost around $7000 while CIRA only costs a couple thousand dollars. Another big difference is CIRA comes off as more socially responsible.

Case in point, one of CIRA’s survey questions is:

Do you agree with the Board Committee’s proposed recommendation to allocate excess revenues, should they occur, to causes and activities which serve Canada’s future social and economic development through the promotion and development of electronic commerce in Canada?

YES! It’s a step in right direction.

This might be one of the few things I’ll say about MTS.

I added a new telephone on Thursday (scheduled for Wednesday). The technician, Richard, who did the work was great. He was really considerate about how he did his job. And then today, I caught a MTS utility truck in the backlane jacking some massive limbs off my back tree. I asked them for the wood for my neighbour’s firepit, and they did one better by repositioning some other wires to help my landscaping.

I hate to see the tree limbs go down, but it saves me the money from having to do the work myself. Sweet!

Bruce Owen, of the Winnipeg Free Press, wrote a great article on the country’s only “Community Prosecutor”, Susan Helenchilde.

The role of the community prosecutor was recently created by the Manitoba government (Kudos to the Provincial NDP) and it seems, her role is to be the “go to person” within Manitoba Justice to co-ordinate prevention strategies within the tri-levels of government.

(Susan) Helenchilde is Canada’s sole community prosecutor. In the job for about six months, her turf is the downtown and the West End. She spends more time there than in the courtroom, although she’s perfectly at home standing in front of a judge.

Under a unique project set up by Manitoba Justice last year, Helenchilde’s job is to get out from behind the desk and work with residents, business owners and community groups, not only to root out crime, but to prosecute offenders as well.

For instance, she says her program only deals with adult chronic offenders, people like Tew who are nuisance offenders, but who cause significant problems.

“They are interfering with people’s quality of life on a regular basis,” she says.

And a guy like Tew fit the bill. With help from folks in the West End, Helenchilde got the 44-year-old charged and then took him to court where on April 25, she got provincial court Justice Ken Champagne to send him to Stony Mountain Institution for two years.

For shoplifting.

“I’m not saying every shoplifter deserves to go to the penitentiary, but this is an offender who really needs to be supervised,” Helenchilde says.

Helenchilde credits Justice Minister Gord Mackintosh for creating the community prosecutor position. Common in the United States but virtually unheard of in Canada, the best way to describe it is by comparing it to community-based policing — except by a Crown attorney instead of a cop.

“Manitoba is a place where you can try these innovative projects,” says Helenchilde, whose background is in drug prosecutions and domestic violence in Vancouver.

“When I had the opportunity to come here, I grabbed it.” In her role as community prosecutor, Helenchilde says she’s able to build her case not so much from the perspective of the Criminal Code, but the business owners victimized by Tew.

Rather than a file landing on her desk to prosecute, Helenchilde involves herself more in the actual investigation stages, helping to build the case almost from its beginnings.

“We were able to speak directly to a person in the Justice Department who listened to our concerns,” Stan Halbesma, owner of Harry’s Foods on Portage Avenue, says. “Through Susan, the courts truly understood how devastating shoplifting can be.”

For Halbesma, Tew’s conviction on six counts of theft is a small step toward making the neighbourhood safer for Halbesma’s customers and employees.

“I don’t know how much Leonard Tew being out of the picture helps me, but I know how much Susan Helenchilde being in the picture helps me,” he says.

Helenchilde says her job also includes meeting people. First, she meets with people in the area; its boundaries are the Red River to the east, the Assiniboine River to the south, Maryland Street to the west and Pacific Avenue to the north.

At a glance:
* Susan Helenchilde is Canada’s first community prosecutor.

* She brings together Winnipeg police and local stakeholders to target street crime and other locally identified priorities for both aggressive prosecution and co-ordinated prevention strategies.

* The prosecutor works in downtown Winnipeg and the city’s West End.

* Her focus is on chronic adult offenders whose repeat crimes (theft, vandalism, prostitution or public intoxication) pose a public safety risk.

* At any give time, she handles between 30 and 60 files.

* Helenchilde says she expects the community prosecutor program will be expanded to other parts of the city in the coming years.