GUNTER: Web publication fights in court after bizarre ruling

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Canadian officialdom just can’t get past the idea that they and they alone have been gifted with the intelligence and judgment to determine what the public should hear or see on the Internet.

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The best example, of course, is the Trudeau Liberals’ Online Harms Act which would empower the CRTC, the Canadian Human Rights Commission and a Digital Safety Commissioner to force internet posters and service providers to take down any post deemed by these government appointees to be offensive, dangerous or “misinformation.”

Takedown orders could be based solely on complaints from activist groups. So what do you think the online lifespan would be of a post that challenges climate change alarmism or wonders aloud how come no remains have been produced if there are “mass graves” around many residential schools?

The latest example of this we-must-protect-you-from-yourselves attitude is a ruling in late May by Federal Court Justice Yvan Roy who decided it was OK for federal civil servants to share passwords to subscriber-only content on news websites.

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One Parks Canada manager, Genevieve Patenaude, had been instructed by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s office to purchase a single membership to the online Parliamentary watchdog service, Blacklock’s Reporter.

After checking the Blacklock’s story the minister had asked Patenaude to check, Patenaude emailed her login credentials to at least nine other Parks Canada senior staff. “If you ever need to access any Blacklocks articles …” she invited her colleagues, followed by her username and password.

Bizarrely, Justice Roy ruled “This constitutes the simple act of reading by officials with an immediate interest in the articles for (work-related) reasons. There is no evidence this was … a frolic in territory protected by copyright.”

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Of course it’s an infringement on copyright. How could it be anything else?

In order to buy the Blacklock’s subscription, Patenaude had to agree to that site’s terms of use which clearly prohibit the sharing of logins or copyrighted articles.

Moreover, once Blacklock’s detected the use of her login credentials from multiple locations, they sent Patenaude several emails explaining that if she wanted to share a password or content with colleagues, she should contact Blacklock’s publisher, Holly Doan, for an institutional subscription.

Roy inexplicably determined that all this legal mumbo-jumbo was just too complicated for Parks Canada employees to understand, even though teenage gamers have no trouble whatsoever understanding similar restrictions on their use of software.

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But even more dangerous than Roy’s clearly wrong decision on copyright infringement and what is basically online shoplifting of Blacklock’s private property, is his justification that Parks Canada’s intrusion was in the “public interest.”

Somehow when governments steal it’s different than when members of the public steal because, “There is a significant public interest in reading articles with a view to protecting the public and the press against errors and omissions.”

See, if you don’t conform to the government’s opinions or, in the case of Blacklock’s, if you might embarrass the government by digging up dirt, agents of the government don’t have to respect your legal rights.

What’s the big fuss? It was a little harmless fact-checking, in Roy’s view.

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Put aside for the moment the fact that the government is no better at or less biased than the public at sifting fact from misinformation. Their version of the facts is often no more than official opinion. So it is simply too risky to put anyone (well-meaning bureaucrats included), in charge of determining what can and cannot be posted.

Now extend Roy’s principal – that governments may violate rights when they deem that doing so is in the public interest – to other potential abuses, such as warrantless wiretaps.

Whether it is permitting a handful of civil servants to read copyrighted material without paying or arbitrarily seizing books a government official deems seditious, the principal being violated is the same.

This week, Blacklock’s announced it is appealing Roy’s ruling.

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