CIPPIC sees expansion in staff and activities after year and a half in operation

After a high-profile year and a half in operation, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) is set to grow significantly to deal with an increasing number of requests for help, as well as a widening scope of activities. The clinic is currently seeking to hire a second full-time staff lawyer. Further, the group has struck a deal with Toronto law firm Fogler, Rubinoff that sees the shop providing CIPPIC with ongoing pro bono assistance across a spectrum of initiatives and cases. Finally, CIPPIC is responding to requests by other lawyers interested in helping the group’s work by forming what executive director Pippa Lawson is calling a "CIPPIC-cooperating" list of practitioners. The expanded resources will help CIPPIC handle both more policy work and respond to a greater number of client requests. The group was founded at a time when copyright and technology law issues were coming to the fore, but without any public interest group that could work as the equivalent of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States. Funded by a consortium of universities - Ottawa, Carleton, Queen’s and McMaster - along with Amazon.com and the Ontario Research Network for E-Commerce to the tune of $500,000, CIPPIC has thus far gained the greatest attention for its work in the case brought by Canada’s record labels against Internet service providers to divulge the names of subscribers accused of illegal music file-sharing. CIPPIC’s involvement continues in that case, and it has status as an intervener for an upcoming Federal Court of Appeal trial representing the public interest. Beyond that, though, the group was founded with a broad and open mandate in public interest that encompasses privacy and other copyright concerns. Despite limited resources to date, CIPPIC has deliberately kept that focus flexible. "We’ve left the mandate exactly the same, which is broader than we can possibly cover," says Lawson. "But, the reason we’re leaving it is it leaves us the flexibility to deal with the issues that need more attention. We will continue on. We’ve got a track record now in copyright law reform and privacy. Those will be the areas that we continue to focus on. What I’m hoping is that these additional resources will allow us to spend more time on some of the issues that I came to the clinic with more background in, like consumer protection issues and different kinds of privacy issues, too. I think this will allow us to do more within the mandate that we’ve got, and hopefully it will, in particular, allow us to respond more to clients and individual requests. That’s where I feel we haven’t been able to do as much as I would have liked to. I’m just one person and can’t supervise the student’s work in all of this." Lawson says that with greater resources and capacity that will come with a new staffer, a list of lawyers willing to lend a hand, and the new relationship with Fogler, Rubinoff, CIPPIC’s activities will only get broader, while maintaining current activities. Copyright, on which the clinic’s current fame is based, will stay an important focus. "We intend to do more in that area. That is, representing what we think is a public interest perspective on issues where there is very powerful industry lobbying for certain results that we don’t think is in the public interest. We’re hopefully giving voice to an important perspective that policy and law makers need to hear," says Lawson Other areas that will see continued or new activity include the Creative Commons initiative, spam, domain name registration privacy, broader privacy issues and researching the effects of the U.S. Patriot Act on the Canadian public interest.

CIPPIC sees expansion in staff and activities after year and a half in operation

Broadcast | September 17, 2004

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