In the wake of GooglePlus’ (Google+) with its privacy settings, Facebook recently announced to Internet privacy in social networking. For those hoping that these changes signal an important ideological shift toward user-centric rights for a disrespectful digital empire, you may want to stop holding your breath. Despite intense during their roll-out, the changes are both theoretically and pragmatically underwhelming.

Under the new privacy settings you can now pre-approve tagged photos before they appear on your profile; access a drop-down menu to more easily coordinate who can see what on your profile; and – finally – change privacy settings on prior posts.

The reaction to Facebook’s revamped settings have been mixed. optimists welcome the changes as a positive step forward. But the accolades come with caveats. For the – many of whom have the rare ability to couple genuine understanding of this social site’s functionality with a genuine understanding of the potential privacy initiatives that could be undertaken – Facebook should be leading the way in privacy control rather than following. Some cynics would argue that “following” is a generous way to describe Facebook’s so-called privacy overhaul and that this corporate redirecting is more likely motivated by shrinking digital market share than substantive political reorientation.

If we could go into the weeds quickly, we have listed a couple of the most obvious holes in the new options, though there are many additional ones.

Yes, you can pre-approve a photo before it appears on your profile, but realistically, unless that one friend is not friends with any of your other friends, a significant number of people in your social network will still have access to that photo, tagged or not. Facebook seems to be catering to the demographic concerned with the information that an employer could see peering into a personal page. However, the personal sovereignty over one’s online reputation through photos is only skin-deep; virtually every other social group remains unaffected by this new feature and will continue to be able to see the photos. Being powerless to a tag was certainly arcane, but the time has come for a more aggressive discussion around the idea that perhaps a person should be able to request a removal, a crop or a blurring of a photo containing their likeness.

Similarly, the drop-down menu to coordinate access levels still requires significant preparatory work by the member to use. Had Facebook allowed a plethora of privacy/blocking delineations from its inception – as Google+ did with circles – then the ability to quick-select access levels for newly posted information would be useful. Unfortunately, most users were already several hundred “friends” deep before Facebook even thought to allow for anything other no-holds-barred friending. The onus remains on users to retroactively go through and re-allocate original friend lists into preferred privacy settings in order to truly allow the drop-down menu function to be useful. Facebook’s drop-down menu would be much more impressive if accompanied by a more user-friendly way of systematizing friends post-acceptance.

One of the more interesting aspects from the Canadian perspective is the relative silence from Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart. Stoddart has been an influential force vis-à-vis Facebook’s privacy settings and was one of the first prominent voices to raise key questions about how this Internet giant stores or shares our online personal information. In 2009 a yearlong report which stated that Facebook had been “operating outside of the country’s private sector privacy law.” She had identified as one of the major stumbling blocks in Facebook’s privacy development.

Though Stoddart would undoubtedly welcome the new advances in Facebook’s privacy controls and their increased emphasis on consent, it would be interesting to know if she feels that these revamped rules are as broad and encompassing as the ones she had envisioned in her report.

From a practical perspective, it is unlikely that someone in a role as generally charged with the safeguarding of privacy for an entire nation will be able to keep up with the minutiae and detailed pros and cons of complex social networks, which are currently springing up or mutating weekly or even daily. At the rate of code development and website improvement, the days of privacy reports that take aim at one social network won’t last. The country needs a set of forum-agnostic privacy principles that can be mass-applied as a check against not one, but all social networks.

The post Facebook’s So-Called Privacy Boost Gets Few “Likes” appeared first on IPOsgoode.

Borders will not be the last book chain to because of insufficient revenue in an. But while there is in the loss, there are also curious digital and intellectual property gains .

The most obvious non-mortar asset is the contract with Kobo. A formalized relationship, Borders sold exclusively Kobo e-readers in exchange for shares in Kobo, non-transferable shares. The question remains, who will own the Borders shares if Borders liquidates to the point of non-existence? Borders has retained IP firm to handle that question. In the meantime, though Borders has stopped selling and stocking Kobos, it continues to funnel customer requests toward Kobo.

The next most obvious non-mortar asset up for grabs is . A recent revamp has left the site with a worthwhile hub of book reviews, features and guest bloggers. In theory, this site managed properly could be the centrepiece of the remaining Borders company, though it would undeniably need to link any books mentioned to a former competitor’s sales site.

The least obvious assets still on the table – especially if the website is shut down or de-Borderized – are the company’s incredibly well-populated Twitter handle and Facebook page. Borders’ main Facebook page 895,000 likes and its Twitter handle 236,000 followers. Though it might be difficult to put a dollar value on these influential and powerful assets, there could be a argument to do so. That said, the fine print of Facebook and Twitter contracts may also have a role to play before passwords and logins can be exchanged.

Finally, Borders likely kept a membership list. Personal information would have been collected en masse. It would be interesting to see what the small print of the membership contract said: can these lists be sold as property? How much is personal information worth? These questions have a much broader context than the names and telephone numbers collected by this now defunk bookstore. If Facebook were to ever collapse, would the personal information stored online ever be up for grabs? This is a huge concern for companies who store information cross-borders (no pun intended), where different laws will apply in to the different countries involved. Cross-border concerns, however, won’t affect Borders. The US chain was, in fact, from ever coming to Canada in a rather typical display of mid-90s protectionism.

Governments used to be one of the few entities that collected personal information; history has been witness to how this information has been gathered, abused and shared (or not shared). As we move further and further into an age where companies collect more personal information than ever before, how that information is used after the demise of a corporation should become more standardized and regulated.

The post Goodbye Borders, Hello Asset Fight appeared first on IPOsgoode.

For anyone with family members at Apple, Research in Motion, Microsoft, Ericsson, Sony and EMC, don't forget to put "A Nortel patent" on your wish list this Christmas. There's at least 6, 000 to go around.

As was outlined in pre-sale IPilogue blog post, the big tech with all these players successfully in the biggest patent auction in world history, and for a far greater price tag than many expected - $4.5 billion to be exact.

The sale made headlines both because of US anti-trust as well as Canadian about the loss of such a large amount of domestically-developed intellectual property.

On issues of domestic economic asset management, the Government has to review and block asset sales under the Investment Canada Act but it ambiguously claimed that the threshold values required for review were not .

Just as the US monopoly concerns turned out to be invalid, so were the economic sovereignty ones, to a degree. Through natural market mechanisms and relationships, Canada's top blue-chip computing manufacturer Research In Motion (RIM) joined the consortium and won a fraction of the patents. Although the patents are unlikely to be distributed numerically in a ratio to match the relative pots put forward by each company, it is safe to say that their value will distributed according to buy-in, which means that RIM will receive 17 percent of the patent package value. Thus, slightly under 1/5 of the original patents will remain in Canadian hands.

A cynic might say that these patents won’t necessarily remain in Canadian hands for long if RIM fortunes continue to decline as was recently indicated by its of 2,000 job cuts, but an optimist will likely argue that these patents could be just what RIM needs to reinvigorate its market offering.

Time will answer many of the detail questions around the eventual winners and losers of this deal from a strict technology perspective. But the lingering question that remains unanswered is whether or not the Government has a cohesive policy or long-term strategy around domestic economic protections and whether or not the refusal to review the Nortel sale is an anomaly or an example. Nortel is the first in a line of similar foreign investment or purchase issues, including spectrum, nuclear and potash.

The government blocked the Potash Corp bid by BHP Billiton in late 2010. Worth over $40 billion, Tony Clement, then Industry Minister, the takeover bid to “not be of net benefit to Canada or Canadians.”

In the Nortel instance, however, Industry Minister Christian Paradis seemed hardly certain that the Investment Canada Act even .

It may be that these two cases are too dissimilar to draw any conclusions: Nortel was bankrupt, Potash Corp was not; Nortel’s bid involved somewhat intangible patents, Potash involved a physical company and Canadian jobs.

Given its previous record with Potash, Ottawa remained mostly ambivalent throughout the auction process, with Paradis only asking his department to review the auction in early July of this year. RIM’s CEO, Jim Balsillie, had been the Government’s intervention as early as 2009.

Consulting and risk management firm Deloitte earlier this year that “roughly two-thirds of Internet use will be via smartphones or other mobile devices by 2014.” If this is true, the 80 percent of the patent package that went to foreign companies will undoubtedly contribute to their profit growth and general market competitiveness. Whether or not these profit advantages should have been reserved for Canadian companies in this particularly case is a national debate that was missed because of weak legislation and a passive approach by the Government.

This 2-year long saga should serve to highlight some of the uncertainties still present in Canadian rules, regulations and acts vis-à-vis intellectual property. The Canada Investment Act needs to be revamped to reflect the growing importance of IP or certainly the method for measuring whether or not the asset value meets the threshold for review.  Legislation needs to reflect that intellectual property is just as – if not more – valuable in today’s interconnected market place.

The post Some Nortel Patents To Remain Canadian Via RIM Following Apple Consortium Bid Win appeared first on IPOsgoode.

Only one post remains on the and it is tellingly tagged "RIP" and "the dion effect." Dion's lawyers sent Nick Angiolillo, the New 91��ɫ blogger who runs the satirical Tumblr site which mocks silly photos of the singer, letter that him to remove all the original posts.

Angiolillo claims that he is likely in the right, but that he doesn't have the financial resources to engage counsel to respond; a wise choice on his part. There are a lot of issues at play here. Firstly, there may be a marked difference between the privacy rights and image/likeness sovereignty that can be demanded by an average citizen as opposed to a celebrity. Another issue here is practically a staple of many IP dilemmas: one nation's protection may be different than another’s, but a URL is, for the most part, international.

What about the fact that they are in many cases the work of photographers? What would be most interesting to know is whether or not Angiolillo purchased the images and rights from photobanks or simply cribbed them off a Google search. If the latter, then Celine Dion's cease and desist letter may only have been the first of several to arrive.

This brings us to an interesting point: attributing the rights of a photo to the photographer may be an outdated and archaic way of organizing online property. Indeed, now that one cultivates, fosters and monitors their online presence, one’s reputation seems to be more valuable than a single photo (or in this case, many). When photographs were primarily utilized by print sources, their regulation and distribution could be easily controlled by the Copyright Act. The world of Internet, however, leads one to ask: what are the rights of the subjects of these photos?

And finally, on the self-expression side, is there any sympathy for the fact that the blog was a genuine piece of tongue-in-cheek parody and not some kind of explosive and commercialized meme? A similar, but intensely more sophisticated site, , has t-shirts and advertising and thus the bloggers in this case are making money by making fun of celebrities. Angiolillo's grassroots site stands in remarked contrast.

Canadian courts have the 'parody defence' of material subject to the Copyright Act. This case, however, would likely be subject to US standards of 'fair use', where using material for parody purposes has been established a .

The ultimate lesson, however, is that in the early days of any legal arena with many suits pending and little precedent work – as most certainly the case with digital intellectual property and likeness law – those with the money to engage lawyers have the upper hand.

The post Celine Dion Takes On Satirical Blogger In David And Goliath Fight (Spoiler: Goliath Wins) appeared first on IPOsgoode.