Quotulatiousness

January 22, 2012

Paulo Coelho: Pirate my work!

Filed under: Books, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

Paulo Coelho finds himself on the opposite side of an issue from where he “should be”:

As an author, I should be defending ‘intellectual property’, but I’m not.

Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written!

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever. First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey. Second, because all writers want what they write to be read, whether in a newspaper, blog, pamphlet, or on a wall.

The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature.

The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they’ll buy the whole book the next day, because there’s nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen.

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

January 20, 2012

Julian Sanchez on SOPA/PIPA: “No matter how bad last season’s crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response”

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

In a posting at the Cato@Liberty blog, Julian Sanchez discusses the claims of SOPA/PIPA supporters that new legislation is necessary to fight piracy:

Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers. My own view is that this ought to be rather secondary to the policy discussion: SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective mechanisms for addressing the problem, and a terrible idea for many other reasons, even if the numbers were exactly right. No matter how bad last season’s crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response. Fortunately, legislators finally seem to be cottoning on to this: SOPA now appears to be on ice for the time being, and PIPA’s own sponsors are having second thoughts about mucking with the Internet’s Domain Name System.

That said, I remain a bit amazed that it’s become an indisputable premise in Washington that there’s an enormous piracy problem, that it’s having a devastating impact on U.S. content industries, and that some kind of aggressive new legislation is needed tout suite to stanch the bleeding. Despite the fact that the Government Accountability Office recently concluded that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the net effect of counterfeiting and piracy on the economy as a whole,” our legislative class has somehow determined that — among all the dire challenges now facing the United States — this is an urgent priority. Obviously, there’s quite a lot of copyrighted material circulating on the Internet without authorization, and other things equal, one would like to see less of it. But does the best available evidence show that this is inflicting such catastrophic economic harm — that it is depressing so much output, and destroying so many jobs — that Congress has no option but to Do Something immediately? Bearing the GAO’s warning in mind, the data we do have doesn’t remotely seem to justify the DEFCON One rhetoric that now appears to be obligatory on the Hill.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance — a kind of meta-trade association for all the content industries, and a zealous prophet of the piracy apocalypse, released a report back in November meant to establish that copyright industries are so economically valuable that they merit more vigorous government protection. But it actually paints a picture of industries that, far from being “killed” by piracy, are already weathering a harsh economic climate better than most, and have far outperformed the overall U.S. economy through the current recession. The “core copyright industries” have, unsurprisingly, shed some jobs over the past few years, but again, compared with the rest of the economy, employment seems to have held relatively stable at a time when you might expect cash-strapped consumers to be turning to piracy to save money.

January 19, 2012

We need “lawful access”, even if we can’t come up with any convincing evidence

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:43

Jesse Brown rounds up the arguments in favour of giving Canadian police the “lawful access” they’ve been clamouring for:

For the past 12 years, Canada’s cops have been pushing for new laws that would allow them to skip the pesky formality of having to get a warrant before spying on us on the Internet. [. . .]

Critics of Lawful Access, such as our federal Privacy Commissioner and every provincial Privacy Commissioner, argue that police have yet to provide sufficient evidence that court oversight has actually slowed them down or stopped them from fighting crime. And now, Canadian police themselves are saying the same thing.

The online rights group OpenMedia.ca has obtained and released a message it says was recently sent by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) to law enforcement colleagues urgently requesting that they provide “actual examples” of cases where the need to get warrants before accessing private information from Internet Service Providers ‘hindered an investigation or threatened public safety.’ The message goes on to admit that though a similar request had been made two years ago, it failed to produce “a sufficient quantity of good examples.”

In other words, even the Chiefs of Police don’t know why they want this new intrusive power.

SOPA delenda est!

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:17

Matt Peckham on the results of yesterday’s blackout:

On Wikipedia’s SOPA Initiative/Lean More page, the site notes that over 12,000 people commented on the Wikimedia Foundation’s post announcing the blackout — ”A breathtaking majority supported the blackout.” On Twitter, Wikipedia says the hashtag topic #wikipediablackout “at one point…constituted 1% of all tweets,” and that SOPA-related Twitter posts were popping off at a rate of a quarter-million every hour. And finally: Wikipedia says over eight million visitors used the site’s zip code tool to look up their elected representatives.

All the traffic to Congressional websites definitely had an impact: At one point Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) tweeted “Anti- #PIPA, #SOPA traffic has temporarily shut down our website.” Other Congressional websites were reportedly slow to load throughout the day or returned error messages for visitors.

And then, the political dominoes began to fall: Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) renounced his support for SOPA (he co-sponsored the bill) yesterday on Facebook, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) used Twitter to tell the world he now opposes the bill and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) told his Facebook followers “better to get this done right rather than fast and wrong.”

The New York Times reports “then trickle turned to flood,” noting that Senators Mark Kirk (R-IL), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) as well as Representatives Lee Terry (R-NE) and Ben Quayle (R-AZ) announced their opposition to the bill. The Times adds that “at least 10 senators and nearly twice that many House members announced their opposition.”

My own tiny contribution wasn’t particularly conclusive: traffic to the blog (in spite of the anti-SOPA clickthrough page) was up by about 20% over the previous week’s average.

Chris Dodd would like to tell all you scummy pirates that your feeble protest is an abuse of power

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Cory Doctorow reminds us that former Senator, now head of the MPAA (one of the organizations pushing hardest for the adoption of SOPA and PIPA) has already added so much to your DVD-watching enjoyment:

After all, he is the CEO of the organization responsible for inserting those unskippable FBI warnings (which are highly prejudiced and factually incorrect, advising, for example, that DVDs can’t be rented, even though the law says they can) before every commercial DVD. He’s the CEO of the organization that inserts those insulting PSAs in front of every movie chiding those of us who buy our DVDs because someone else decided to download the same movie for free.

And he’s the CEO of the organization responsible for the section of the DMCA that makes it illegal to build a DVD player that can skip these mandatory, partisan, commercially advantageous messages.

So he knows a thing or two about “abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”

You know, the kind of stuff that makes you feel like this guy:

And here’s the reason you pay for a legal copy, rather than being one of those evil pirates:

January 18, 2012

Why the rent seekers have been pushing for SOPA and PIPA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Max Titmuss at the Adam Smith Institute summarizes the key points that make SOPA and PIPA so attractive to rent seekers:

The provisions put forward in SOPA and PIPA enable the closing down and harassment of websites (not even necessarily located in the US) on the flimsiest of pretences: government censorship masquerading as copyright protection. But what exactly makes the laws so odious? There are four key, objectionable provisions, all of which are ripe for manipulation by rent-seeking parties (summarised from this link):

  1. The Anti-Circumvention Provision, allowing the US government to close sites who offer advise on merely circumventing censorship mechanisms;
  2. The “Vigilante” Provision, which would grant immunity from prosecution to internet service providers who pre-emptively block potentially offending sites, leaving them inherently vulnerable to pressures from a host of interested parties;
  3. The Corporate Right of Action, enabling copyright holders to obtain an unopposed court order which would cut off foreign websites from payment processors and advertisers;
  4. Expanded Attorney General Powers: therein giving the Attorney General the power to block any domain name and have their results barred from search engines: they would effectively cease to exist.

You don’t need to be a rabid libertarian to realise both SOPA and PIPA are anathema to a society which readily proclaims its commitment to spreading liberal democracy; an integral part of which is the freedom of expression. After all, western nations have waged war purportedly in support of ‘freedom’ and regularly (this time rightly) criticise those nations which continually suppress freedom of expression online.

Mother Jones puts on the rose-coloured glasses over SOPA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

In an otherwise good summary of the SOPA/PIPA issues in Mother Jones, Siddhartha Mahanta and Nick Baumann start the touchdown celebration prematurely:

Late Thursday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the lead sponsor of the House bill, announced that he would consider dropping the DNS-blocking provisions from the bill. Late on Friday, Smith, SOPA’s sponsor, did Leahy one better, removing the provision altogether. Not long after, six Republican senators — including two co-sponsors — released a letter they wrote to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), asking him to hold off on a January 24th vote to end debate on PIPA and move to passage.

By this weekend, the writing was on the wall. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House Majority Leader, announced that SOPA would not come for a vote in the House before the controversy over the bill is resolved — essentially killing it for the time being. The White House issued a statement opposing significant portions of the bills. And Issa cancelled the hearing planned for Wednesday, saying he’s “confident” the bill is dead in the House.

Big Hollywood isn’t entirely beaten yet. PIPA, the Senate legislation, could still get a vote and move closer to becoming law, and a modified version of SOPA could conceivably come to the House floor at some point in the future. Wikipedia, Reddit, MoveOn.org, Mozilla (the maker of the Firefox web browser), the blogging platform WordPress, and others are still planning to go dark on Wednesday, just in case. But as of right now, a combination of grassroots activism, blogging, tweeting, boycotts, and the mere threat of having to scroll through 1500 LOLCats without Icanhazcheezburger (another boycott supporter), seems to have beaten an avalanche of money and lobbying. Those 1950s onion farmers would be proud.

Keep your powder dry, boys: the battle is far from won. This is just the latest skirmish in an ongoing campaign, and premature celebration of the victory is just what we don’t need.

January 17, 2012

Stop SOPA!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:25

Although this is a Canadian blog and SOPA is proposed legislation in the United States, it is extremely likely that Canadian websites and internet users will be directly affected by provisions of it. Michael Geist has a list of reasons why Canadians should be concerned:

First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests itself particularly strongly in Canada. As I discussed in a column last year, SOPA treats all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domain as domestic domain names for U.S. law purposes. Moreover, it defines “domestic Internet protocol addresses” — the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or Internet connection — as “an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States.” Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the U.S., Canada, and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes. To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.

Second, Canadian businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. “in rem” jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection. For those sites, the U.S. grants jurisdiction over the property of the site and opens the door to court orders requiring Internet providers to block the site and Internet search engines to stop linking to it. Should a Canadian website owner wish to challenge the court order, U.S. law asserts itself in another way, since in order for an owner to file a challenge (described as a “counter notification”), the owner must first consent to the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts.

Along with thousands of other bloggers and major internet sites like Wikipedia, Quotulatiousness will be marking the anti-SOPA effort tomorrow. Unless I’ve misconfigured it, you should see a “Down Against SOPA” page the first time you visit the blog tomorrow (either on the main page or on a particular post), but then it should allow you to have normal access. I considered going “dark” as Wikipedia will be, but this seems to be a better way of registering my opposition without inconveniencing my readers too much.

January 16, 2012

Cory Doctorow recommends a book on English libel law

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

There’s a reason that individuals and organizations try to sue for libel under English law, rather than their own national legal system:

The Guardian published a long excerpt from Nick Cohen’s forthcoming You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, a fantastic-looking book that reveals the dirty truth of English libel law, where “money buys silence” for some of the world’s most notorious dictators, thieves, and bad guys. English libel law is so broad that it allows, for example, Russian oligarchs to sue Russian newspapers for punitive sums (“the cost of libel actions in England and Wales is 140 times higher than the European average”) in an English court, merely by demonstrating that someone, somewhere in England looked at the paper’s website. And yet, the libel law in England and Wales doesn’t actually protect people from the most common forms of libelous publication: false declarations of criminal suspicion by the police, false claims of financial irregularities from credit reporting bureaux and false statements in former employers’ reference letters are protected unless they can be shown to have been malicious and negligent.

January 14, 2012

Making the War on Drugs even more dangerous

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

Colby Cosh points out that the recent spate of deaths from ecstasy overdoses in western Canada is at least as much a result of the way the so-called War on Drugs is being prosecuted:

In recent weeks, it seems, adulterated ecstasy (MDMA) has left Alberta and B.C. with a sizable heap of young corpses. A tragedy has thus come home to roost in the West: namely, the tragedy of policy that incentivizes adulteration of drugs that, if manufactured in the open and checked for purity, would kill hardly anybody. Pure MDMA has a larger “therapeutic index” — a wider safety margin for overdose — than alcohol. It would probably make a pretty reasonable substitute for alcohol in many settings if we were to sit down and rebuild a drug culture from scratch. But over the past ten years or so, both Liberal and Conservative governments have worked to increase penalties for and monitoring of the flow of “precursor chemicals” used in the manufacture of MDMA.

It has been their goal to make pure MDMA more difficult to manufacture; when precursors are seized it is hailed as a triumph. But illicit drug factories never do put out the follow-up press release announcing that they’re putting less MDMA in their “ecstasy” and replacing it with other party drugs that have much smaller safety margins, or with drugs that interact dangerously with MDMA. And when rave kids die as a result, the RCMP chooses not to pose imperiously alongside the body bags giving a big thumbs-up. They are eager to take credit only for the immediately visible results of their work.

[. . .]

The debate over “harm reduction” in Canada has, for the past year or so, revolved around the Insite clinic in East Vancouver. That debate has been fraught with as much confusion and misinformation as drug moralizers could possibly create, but the core message, I think, has gotten through to Canadians, and certainly to the gatekeepers of their media. The message is this: we have only meagre power to stop people from abusing heroin if they are determined to do that. We do have, however, significant ability to protect people from the problems of a poorly-titrated or actively adulterated supply of heroin. The morbidity and mortality burden from the actual addiction itself, compared to the burden resulting from the drug’s illegality, is both modest and intractable. Insite is basically designed to yield the benefits that allowing heroin to be issued by prescription would bring.

Canada is apparently too under-equipped with libertarians to see that the logic extends to ecstasy, which about a million adult Canadians have used at least once. Yet rave-scene users have already been implementing “harm reduction” philosophy on the dance floor for decades. They react as best they can to adulteration risks by sharing information about dealer reliability, and they mitigate the most important medical peril of MDMA — the possibility of hyperthermia, i.e., internal overheating — by making sure ravers have access to cool rooms and plenty of fluids.

No government of any ideological stripe has ever successfully kept intoxicants away from eager customers: not the US government in Prohibition, not the Soviet government (on-the-job drunkenness was endemic), not even modern day prison authorities (drugs are plentiful behind bars). The “War on Drugs” has — predictably — failed. The question should be how to minimize the harm to drug users and society at large, because drug prohibition is a massive failure.

January 13, 2012

Google Kenya’s motto: Do <strike>no</strike> evil

Filed under: Africa, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:40

Someone at Google has some explaining to do:

Since October, Google’s GKBO appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality’s database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners. They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of our database has apparently been contacted.

Furthermore, they now seem to have outsourced this operation from Kenya to India.

When we started this investigation, I thought that we’d catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue.

I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents.

H/T to Megan McArdle for the link.

Update: BoingBoing got a response to their post on this issue from Google’s Vice-President for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging Markets:

We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.

Movie and music piracy: what’s the real economic cost?

Filed under: Economics, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

On the Freakonomics blog, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman look at the actual costs of piracy compared to the ludicrous claimed costs:

Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement — such as those behind the proposed new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress — argue that online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs.

These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs — that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010.

The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”

More recently, a smaller estimate — $58 billion — was produced by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). But that IPI estimate, as both Sanchez and tech journalist Tim Lee have pointed out, is replete with methodological problems, including double- and triple-counting, that swell the estimate of piracy losses considerably.

Do you write fan fiction? You might want to check for plagiarists re-using your work

Filed under: Books, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

Plagiarism is a problem, but how do you react when someone takes your (erotic) fan fiction work without permission and packages and re-sells it?

After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon’s U.K. Kindle store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little Mouth, My Step Mom and Me, Wicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating [sic] Her, plus one called Dracula’s Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.

[. . .]

It turns out Cruz isn’t the only self-published plagiarist. Amazon is rife with fake authors selling erotica ripped word-for-word from stories posted on Literotica, a popular and free erotic fiction site that according to Quantcast attracts more than 4.5 million users a month, as well as from other free online story troves. As recently as early January, Robin Scott had 31 books in the Kindle store, and a down-and-dirty textual analysis revealed that each one was plagiarized. Rachel M. Haven, a purveyor of incest, group sex, and cheating bride stories, was selling 11 pilfered tales from a variety of story sites. Eve Welliver had eight titles in the Kindle store copied from Literotica and elsewhere, and she had even thought to plagiarize some five-star reviews. Luke Ethan’s author page listed four works with titles like My Step Mom Loves Me and OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual, and it doesn’t appear he wrote any of them. Maria Cruz had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent, while her typo-addled alter ego Mariz Cruz was hawking Wicked Desire: Steamy bondage picture volume 1. 



January 12, 2012

When is an “insult” a criminal offence?

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

The answer, in the UK anyway, may well be “any time the insultee cares to call in the police“:

If you are reading this, chances are, you are a moron. There, have I insulted you? I’m asking because I have no idea if what I just stated has insulted you. Only YOU can be the judge of what you find insulting, yet plans are afoot for it to be a criminal offence to “insult” someone. So if you feel insulted, there is nothing to stop you ringing 999 and having the evil perpetrator banged up, DNA’ed and given a criminal record, although they will have had absolutely no idea that their actions or words have insulted you. If we criminalise “insults”, we shut up everyone and everything. For ever. Do you want to live in a society where you dare not speak in case the State decides your words may cause offence to people you will never meet? Now’s your chance to speak against it, USE IT, whilst you still can.

Now, I choose to be anonymous on my many public outings because, well, my face is my business. Unless I am actually committing a crime, it is not the business of the State to know what I look like anymore than it is the business of the State to randomly sweep bus stop queues for fingerprints. One of the reasons I wear a mask is because of the habit of the state to record the faces of those “who might” cause trouble, “for future reference”. The Met employ teams of photographers to take photos of any members of public who may be dissenting, sticks them on a database and cross references them. No thanks. My face belongs to me, it is my property, I will cover it when and if I choose. Naturally, this proposal is stop women wearing Burqas because some sensitive souls “may be offended” (see above), but as always, I say it is not the role of the State to dictate how I may dress.

Federal government throws a wrench into the same-sex marriage debate

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Updated below: I should retract my implication that this was a deliberate ploy by the federal government to re-open the same-sex marriage debate. It clearly is not, and was not any kind of political ploy — although at least one lawyer in the Justice department feels it should be. Original post:

Just when we thought the whole thing had been settled, Ottawa decides to toss their social conservative base a bone:

The Harper government has served notice that thousands of same-sex couples who flocked to Canada from abroad since 2004 to get married are not legally wed.

The reversal of federal policy is revealed in a document filed in a Toronto test case launched recently by a lesbian couple seeking a divorce. Wed in Toronto in 2005, the couple have been told they cannot divorce because they were never really married — a Department of Justice lawyer says their marriage is not legal in Canada since they could not have lawfully wed in Florida or England, where the two partners reside.

The government’s hard line has cast sudden doubt on the rights and legal status of couples who wed in Canada after a series of court decisions opened the floodgates to same-sex marriage. The mechanics of determining issues such as tax status, employment benefits and immigration have been thrown into legal limbo.

This new development will certainly re-invigorate the debate about same-sex marriage — perhaps to head off a debate about polygamy (there are many Muslim families living in Canada with the husband having more than one wife, for example).

Update: Matt Gurney offers a more comprehensible account of the court case and the government’s response:

The legalities of the situation are complex. The unidentified couple, whose names are covered by a publication ban, returned to Canada to apply for a divorce after being married here seven years ago. They were not able to obtain said divorce because under the Divorce Act, applicants must be residents of Canada for at least 12 months. This couple does not, and seemingly never has, lived in Canada. They just chose to marry (and split up) here because it was not possible for them to do so in their home jurisdictions.

Uninterested in living in Canada for a year just to get divorced, the couple filed a Charter claim against the Ontario and federal governments, claiming that the residency requirement violated their Section 7 right to “life, liberty and security of the person” and their Section 15 right to equality under the law. These both seem to be spurious arguments — but rather than fight them on their own (lacking) merits, a government lawyer instead deployed this humdinger of a legal manoeuvre: They can’t get divorced because it turns out they were never married at all.

Done! Easy-peasy. Let’s break for lunch.

The government is arguing that since Florida and the U.K. — the home jurisdictions of the estranged couple — don’t recognize gay marriages, a gay marriage licence issued in Canada isn’t legally valid. People living in Canada, Canadian or otherwise, would have no problem, because Canada does recognize same-sex unions. But if your home country or state doesn’t, then the government has argued that a Canadian marriage has no standing in law. Weird, but true.

[. . .]

To be clear — the suggestion that these couples were never married under Canadian law, a suggestion advanced by a single government lawyer — is ridiculous. The notion that Canadian law should be dependent on the local laws of every single other jurisdiction on the planet is asinine. A government that has made so much of standing up for Canada’s values on the world stage has no business declaring our own laws subservient to any other land’s. We might not have the hard- or soft-power to give our laws much weight abroad, but we can at least honour them in our own country.

Update, 13 January: The government is actually responding quickly and correctly to the story:

Canada’s justice minister says all same-sex marriages performed in Canada are legally recognized and the government is working to ensure foreign couples married here can divorce if they chose to.

“Marriages performed in Canada that aren’t recognized in couple’s home jurisdiction will be recognized in Canada,” Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said Friday in Toronto.

“I want to be very clear that our government has no intention of reopening the debate on the definition of marriage,” he added.

[. . .]

“I want to make it clear that in our government’s view, these marriages are valid,” Nicholson said.

[. . .]

The Harper government went immediately into damage control and denied that they were looking into the issue.

“We’re not going to reopen that particular issue,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters Thursday.

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