Articles by Javad Heydary

The Court of Appeal for Ontario recently considered whether there was a cause of action for the invasion of personal privacy in Jones v.Tsige. The case involved two bank employees, Sandra Jones and Winne Tsige, who worked at two different branches of the same bank. The respondent, Tsige, was in a relationship with the former husband of the appel...

This story was originally published on Sept. 28, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Is there a reasonable expectation of anonymity when defamatory content is posted on the Internet? Is there a difference if the content posted is in the context of political speech? ...

Is there a reasonable expectation of anonymity when defamatory content is posted on the Internet? Is there a difference if the content posted is in the context of political speech? The answer to these questions is becoming increasingly important as cases surrounding defamatory content are becoming much more frequent. The outcome of Internet-relate...

For obvious reasons, this author hopes that a hyperlink, on its own, cannot be defamatory. Yet this is precisely the question before Canada's Supreme Court in Crookes v. Newton. The defendant, who operates P2PNet.net, authored an article entitled "Free Speech in Canada," including hyperlinks to further articles that were allegedly defamatory of the plaintiff.

The issue of whether online gambling should be legalized is once again being taken up in the U.S. Congress. The Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act has been introduced by Rep. John Campbell, R-Calif., with Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., as a leading cosponsor. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., and Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., are also leading cosponsors. This bill is nearly identical to the anti-UIGEA (the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act) bill introduced in the 111th Congress last year. ...

Governments in a number of jurisdictions are moving not only to regulate online gaming but also to become an active participant in the industry Various provinces in Canada have recently entered into the online gaming industry by developing and providing online gaming websites. In July of 2010, the Province of British Columbia opened the first gover...

The New Zealand High Court recently ruled that a former cricketer accused of match-fixing over Twitter can pursue his Twitter libel case Lalit Modi, a cricketing administrator, took to Twitter to accuse Chris Cairns, a former cricketer, of match-fixing on Twitter. Cairns in turn filed a lawsuit, claiming that Modi's tweet was libelous.

The United States' largest trading partner and direct neighbor to the north recently made the bold statement that the Ontario government will be entering the online gambling business Following moves by other Canadian provinces, including British Columbia and several Maritime Provinces, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) will have an o...

Last August, Douglas Rennick, a Canadian citizen, was charged with various offenses by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Specifically, Rennick was charged with several criminal indictments, including bank fraud, money laundering conspiracy, gambling conspiracy, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Rennick, through himself and the family of companies under his direct control, provided payment services for Internet gambling businesses. ...

The U.S. Federal Court for the Southern District of New York recently ordered the unsealing of court filings submitted by Viacom and Google in Viacom's three-year old, US$1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube The released documents paint a tale of corporate intrigue and greed, and shed light on some of the behind-th...

General peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems have been ubiquitous throughout the Internet since the mid-1990s. While such systems were made famous -- or infamous -- by the likes of Napster, the common thread with those systems was the general architecture. P2P systems consist of a distributed network architecture that requires participants to make a portion of their computer system resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants without the need for a central server or host to oversee the exchange. ...

Over the past decade, online gambling has expanded to become a multi-billion dollar business. There are over 2,000 gambling sites worldwide; however, none of these sites are based in the United States, as the U.S. possesses stringent gambling laws. Most notably, in 2006, the U.S. Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which makes it illegal for U.S. financial institutions to transfer money to offshore gambling Web sites or to the online payment services which those Web sites use. As a result of the UIGEA, many non-U.S. Internet gambling Web sites halted their provision of services to U.S. residents...

Since its conception in 2006, Twitter has gained considerable notoriety and publicity worldwide. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging online service that permits users to post updates, known as "tweets." These text-based tweets -- limited to 140 characters -- are displayed on the individual user's profile page. Tweets can be de...

I frequently encounter intellectual property disputes between companies and independent contractors doing work for those companies. Often, the disputes involve trying to determine who owns the copyright to materials developed during their working relationship. Whether you are an employer or a worker, failing to know your rights with respect to copyright can be a costly mistake...

Disputes over the regulation of online real estate businesses that have surfaced in the last few years have caused the courts to recognize the importance of the Internet to the real estate industry For example, earlier this year, a Federal Court in Sacramento, Calif. had to consider a California law that required Web sites to obtain a real estate b...

In a recent decision that might have long-term implications on how Internet search engines run their advertising programs, the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia released its written opinion on Government Insurance Company v. Google, Inc., et al., a case decided a while back The Court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to b...

A recent survey in the United States has highlighted the growing trend of employers to electronically monitor employees in the workplace According to the 2005 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute, employers have been increasing their efforts to implement electro...

The majority of U.S. states are moving to end the tax-free ride for most online shoppers, a development that is facing opposition from some members of the public, businesses and a number of federal lawmakers At present, 43 states have joined a states-led coalition called the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP), which is taking steps to collect sal...

Private messages exchanged using corporate BlackBerry wireless devices might not be quite so private after all as evidenced by a recent lawsuit filed in Toronto, Canada, by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) The lack of security through the use of such devices, which are increasingly utilized by employees to access corporate e-mail accou...

On April 27, President George Bush signed a copyright bill that aims to legalize technology that allows users to automatically skip over or mute objectionable content in movie DVDs Contained in DVD players and other devices, the filtering technology allows parents to prevent their children from seeing scenes involving sex, violence or foul language...