The Wired Gadget Lab blog has an article about a restaurant in London (the other London, unfortunately) that projects touchscreens on its tables.  You order your food by selecting menu items off the touchscreen projections, and view and pay your bill the same way.   You can also see an image of  each menu item before you order.  And while you wait, you can play video games. 

They also have cameras set up so you can watch your meal being prepared – but I’m not sure I really want to see that.

Howard Knopf points to a Canwest article talking about how Heritage Minister James Moore uses PVR’s and iPods.  That’s important because under current law, and the last proposed copyright reform bill, some of the things we all routinely do with those types of device technically violates copyright laws.

Hopefully Mr. Moore will understand that and pull together a more realistic and balanced bill than we have seen before.

For the London Free Press – March 9, 2009

Read this on Canoe

George Orwell’s depiction of state surveillance in 1984 is beginning to look less like science fiction and more like reality in the United Kingdom, where successive governments have created one of the most extensive and advanced surveillance systems in the world.

The British House of Lords just released a report that expresses concern over the U.K.’s extensive closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance network and its growing national DNA database, which contains information even about innocent people.

Its estimated that the U.K. has about 4 million public CCTV cameras. And Britain’s national DNA database contains information on 7% of the population, compared to only 0.5% in the United States.

Many government organizations claim the widespread surveillance and data collection enjoys public support by providing a greater sense of security.

But many others share a concern expressed by John Burrow, former chief constable of Essex, who believes that when the public fully recognizes the capabilities and intrusions of CCTV, it “may well be that there will be a falling off of public confidence in the authorities having control of such system.”

The eye-opening House of Lords report, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, questions the effectiveness of the surveillance and data gathering and stresses the importance of individual privacy.

It examines how surveillance and the collection of personal data are altering the relationship between people and the state and between individuals. It further canvasses whether the right to privacy is too easily overridden by the government’s assertion that these anti-crime measures are necessary.

This is similar to the statement contained in the 2007-08 Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s annual report on the Privacy Act: “The Orwellian dystopia was predicated on a totalitarian society. In our democracy, benevolent intentions appear to be pushing us toward a surveillance society.”

While the report does not go so far as to say that the U.K. has become an Orwellian state, it does say that “the expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War.”

The House of the Lords covers the claimed advantages of having this information, including the deterrence of crime, assistance to law enforcement, increased public safety, and the efficient provision of public services. Many, however, question how effective surveillance actually is in achieving those goals.

But the report also says that many of Britain’s “surveillance practices are unknown to most people and their potential consequences are not fully appreciated.”

Disadvantages, some of which are more difficult to quantify than the advantages, include the threat to privacy and social relationships, increased mistrust of the State, the risk to personal security and of identity fraud, as well as the selective way in which the technologies might be used to discriminate against certain categories of individuals. It isn’t always about what people are trying to hide, but rather what they are trying to protect.

To safeguard individual privacy from misuse of CCTV surveillance and the National DNA database, the report urges transparency and control over how and by whom the technologies are used.

The debate between state supervision and personal privacy rights will continue.

While it does, be careful — Big Brother just might be watching you, especially if you’re in the U.K.

The Kindle text to speech feature has created a controversy on both the legal issue of copyright, and the business/consumer issue of the merits of computerized text to speech vs. audio books using voice actors.

Those on the voice actor side say that a computer generated voice just can’t match a human voice for subtlety, tone and context.  (At least not yet.)

On the copyright front, Amazon has decided that – despite its position that there is no copyright violation in text to speech – it won’t offer the feature for books if the author doesn’t want it.

In a CNN article, David Ciccarelli of Voices.com - a London, Ont. service that matches voice actors with those seeking to hire them – points out that Amazon is hedging its bets, as it also owns  Audible, a  service that sells professionally narrated audiobooks.

A Privacy Commissioner post entitled Trust me…its bleeding  talks about: a new report from Dartmouth College telling us that in the US “data hemorrhages” are coming from all over the health sector including hospitals, physicians, laboratories, as well as outsourced service providers.

It also talks about some Canadian Medical Association thoughts on the topic.

The bottom line is that while it is clear that all possible steps must be taken to prevent the “leakage” of health information, another important aspect is patient trust in the system.   Indeed, there is evidence that many patients don’t tell their doctors everything because of privacy concerns.

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.

It reads:

A few weeks ago Simon Fodden wrote about the “Ontario in the Creative Age” report that basically says we need to turn more to creative work to be successful economically. That builds on the creative class theory that says communities with a higher % of the creative class tend to do better economically.

Especially in light of that, its dissapointing to see that an ITU report that measures the use of information and communications technologies in more than 150 countries dropped Canada from 9th in 2002 to 19th in 2007.

Michael Geist comments that:

No country in the top 50 declined as rapidly as Canada as we were passed by the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, many Asian countries (Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong), and European nations (UK, Luxembourg, Germany, Ireland).

The decline in a sub-index on ICT use is even more dramatic. The sub-index measures Internet user penetration, fixed broadband penetration, and mobile broadband penetration. Canada ranked 4th worldwide in 2002. By 2007, we dropped to 21st worldwide. While the survey also includes data suggesting that Canada has relatively inexpensive fixed broadband (2nd worldwide), the declining numbers are consistent with other studies that indicate that any advantages that Canada had in the late 1990s have long since disappeared.

Canada used to be a world leader in communications technology. The evidence confirms our anecdotal frustrations at, for example, new smartphone technology arriving in Canada long after other countries.

Somehow we need to reverse this trend.

Today (3/3/09) is square root day - when the square root of the last 2 digits of the year are equal to the day and the month.    This happens only 9 times a century – the next being April 4, 2016.

I’m expecting the euphoria of the day to boost the stock markets.

For the London Free Press – March 2, 2009

Read this on Canoe

A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision sent a message to employers to draft employment contracts carefully, holding that it’s inappropriate to rewrite restrictive covenants in most cases.

In Shafron vs. KRG Insurance Brokers (Western) Inc., the court dealt with a 15-year employee. His employment contract included a covenant forbidding him from being employed as an insurance brokerage in the “Metropolitan City of Vancouver” for three years after the end of his employment with KRG.

In 2001, the employee left KRG and began working at another insurance brokerage in Richmond, B.C. KRG commenced an action, arguing he was violating the restrictive covenant.

Restrictive covenants on employees are considered contrary to public policy because they’re viewed as a restraint on trade. In other words, they can prevent an individual from earning a living. Courts construe them very narrowly and won’t enforce them if they stray beyond certain accepted norms.

Courts are more inclined to enforce clauses that prevent a former employee from contacting customers of the former employer they dealt with or that prevent the employee using a former employer’s proprietary or confidential information.

Courts evaluate the reasonableness of a restrictive covenant based on its geographic and temporal scope and the scope of the work it seeks to prohibit. But reasonableness cannot be defined if the restrictive covenant is ambiguous.

In Shafron, the Supreme Court ruled that they could not assess the reasonableness of the covenant because the term “Metropolitan City of Vancouver” did not make clear what geographic location it was trying to exclude.

The court set out two possible ways of correcting an ambiguous covenant.

“Notional severance” includes “reading down” part of the restrictive covenant so the remainder is legal and therefore enforceable.

The court held that it is never appropriate to use notional severance to correct an ambiguous restrictive covenant because it amounts to the court rewriting the employment contract.

Such a remedy would cause problems because it would let employers draft overly broad restrictive covenants, knowing the courts will reduce unreasonable parts to make them reasonable.

The second method is “blue-pencil severance,” which involves removing the illegal or overbroad part of a restrictive covenant, then enforcing the rest.

The court held that blue-pencil severance is “only possible if the judge can strike out, by drawing a line through, the portion of the contract they want to remove, leaving the portions that are not tainted by illegality, without affecting the meaning of the part remaining.”

The court said blue-pencil severance should only be used in the rarest of circumstances and only when the removed portion does not affect the overall intended purpose of the contract provision.

Ultimately, the court held that neither amendment method was appropriate in the Shafron case and ruled the restrictive covenant was too ambiguous to uphold.