Canadian Hosting Providers - how do you handle copyright and trademark complaints

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Thu Jun 6 19:21:11 UTC 2013


On Jun 6, 2013, at 12:01 , Roy <r.engehausen at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 6/6/2013 11:07 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> On Jun 5, 2013, at 22:30 , Roy <r.engehausen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 6/5/2013 4:40 PM, Nick Khamis wrote:
>>>> On 6/5/13, Sameer Khosla <skhosla at neutraldata.com> wrote:
>>>>> My personal favorite is the number of notices that we receive as DMCA
>>>>> takedown notices, citing the specific laws.
>>>>> 
>>>> I'm not sure US copyright laws even apply to us here in Canada?
>>>> What countries have no internet laws?
>>>> 
>>>> N.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> US laws apply where ever the US says they apply.
>>> 
>> How do you figure that?
> 
> A government can say anything it wants to

That's not what you said. You said "US laws apply wherever the US says they apply."

I agree that the US government can claim its laws apply wherever they wish to clam they apply.

That is a far cry from having them ACTUALLY apply there.

> 
>> 
>> The US power to enforce US law is limited to:
>> 
>> 	1.	US Citizens (pretty much wherever they are, unfortunately)
>> 	2.	Things that happen within the borders of the united states
>> 	3.	Transactions involving entities within the borders of the united states or
>> 		citizens of the US.
>> 
>> Beyond that, their power is supposed to be pretty limited.
> 
> Limited by who?
> 

Unfortunately, that is the real crux of the matter, now, isn't. However, at least on a theoretical level, the government should be limited by the powers granted to it by the constitution and by the voters.

> A government can pass any law that it wants to and apply it to anyone.  It then becomes a question of how it enforces that law and that is limited by its ability to project power.  See

Yes and no. Depends somewhat on the structure of the government. In the case of the united States, Congress can pass any bill that they want, however, absent a 2/3rd majority, it then needs signature of the president. Beyond that, you still have the issue that the judiciary may strike that law down as unconstitutional.

As an example, I'm quite certain that if the US Congress passed a law stating that we would tax all Spanish citizens residing on Spanish soil $100 per year in perpetuity, that law would have the following problems:

	1.	The president would probably never sign it.
	2.	If the president signed it, the supreme court would likely demonstrate that it can, in fact, act with great
		haste in repealing it.
	3.	I doubt that any Spanish citizen on Spanish soil would have any belief whatsoever that the law actually
		applied to them.
	4.	For any meaningful value of the word "apply", the law would not actually apply to said citizens.

Finally when it came to enforcing the law, I doubt that the US tax collectors and law enforcement officers would be welcomed into Spain with open arms to carry out this application of law. While the US may well be capable of taking on the EU militarily, I suspect it would be very costly to do so and it certainly wouldn't be well supported by the citizenry which I believe would make it difficult for the government to sustain said revenue collection campaign.

Owen





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