Wednesday, June 07, 2017

CASL's civil right of action to be delayed?

I am hearing from reliable sources that the government has agreed to postpone the civil right of action under Canada's Anti-spam Law. The provisions, that were planned to come into effect on July 1, 2017, would mean a person or corporation affected by a CASL contravention can bring a civil lawsuit against the offending person or entity – and seek remedies including monetary compensation and expenses. The maximum penalties are $200 for each commercial electronic message contravention (to a maximum of $1M/day), and $1M for each day on which a software contravention occurs (CASL’s software sections come into force on January 1, 2015).




Very few people in the legal community and in business are in favour of these provisions, and it would appear that the government has been convinced. When the order in council is published, it will appear in the Canada Gazette.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Whereas I'm quite interested in seeinmg them proclaimed: a certain large US firm arguably broke the "no changing someone's computer without their express permission" part of the law (ie, the "no viruses, please" part).

I've heard more heat than light, except perhaps from Mr Sookman, who pointed out legitimate concerns

I nevertheless urge people to consider the law a low hurdle: in pseudo-code the "express permission to email" part takes 9 lines of pseudo-code, at https://github.com/davecb/CASL