Edited Version Published: The Toronto Star, May 31, 2005

Letters to the Editor
The Toronto Star
lettertoed@thestar.ca
1 Yonge St.
Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E6

Dear Editor,

Michael Geist's on-going vendetta against the record industry assumes new dimensions each week. I think readers are entitled to start asking what motive is at the root of this single-minded, attack dog mentality.

Mr. Geist's commentary, ("Ruling states the case for privacy", 30 May), is amazingly unbalanced. He sifts through a 30-page judgment to distill just those portions of it that suit his agenda. He neglects to highlight perhaps the most important portion of the Court of Appeal's decision. The one in which they weighed privacy rights against intellectual property rights and came down in favour of the latter.

Here is exactly what the Court said:

"Intellectual property laws originated in order to protect the promulgation of ideas... Individuals need to be encouraged to develop their own talents and personal expression of artistic ideas, including music. If they are robbed of the fruit of their efforts, their incentive to express their ideas in tangible form is diminished… Although privacy concerns must also be considered it seems to me that they must yield to public concerns for the protection of intellectual property rights in situations where infringement threatens to erode those rights."

And let us be blunt about exactly what sort of activity Mr. Geist is seeking to protect. To file swap, people download software that is specifically designed to allow them to engage in an exceedingly public activity. They invite millions of fellow swappers to have a look at the music and movies in their shared directories and they pick and choose from what their fellow swappers have on public offer. This is a blatantly public activity. It is carried on in full view of millions of people. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy here at all. Having expropriated the creations of other people (films, music, books) they then want to hide behind privacy laws? Who is Mr. Geist kidding?

Not the Court of Appeal, that's for sure. They firmly rejected Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic's (CIPPIC) arguments, which would have allowed infringers to hide behind the cloak of anonymity while engaging in expropriation of cultural products on an unimaginable scale.

CIPPIC and Mr. Geist have done nothing to warn consumers about P2P services - services that constitute the number one threat to privacy on the Internet. P2P services are the single greatest source of malicious online spyware. CIPPIC knows this, as they have made legal submissions to this effect. It is file swapping and its attendant threat to privacy that should concern our Privacy Commissioner as well as Canadian law enforcement officials.

Yours sincerely,