Anti-Malware Law Not in Favour of Canadian Businesses

Canadian businesses need to be cautious of the newly proposed federal anti-malware law. An eminent lawyer Barry Sookman of "McCarthy Tetrault", a Toronto-based law firm, commented that the C-27 bill (earlier known as the Electronic Commerce Protection Act) needed a re-thinking or certain amendments, as reported by ITWorld on May 28, 2009.

The C-27 bill introduced in April 2009, once approved, will prohibit the businesses from sending commercial e-mails without the recipients' consent. As per the proposed bill, consumers and businesses will have the right to take the malware distributors based in Canada to the court of justice. Penalties faced by malware distributors may vary from as less as $1 Million (for individuals) to as high as $10 Million (for businesses).

This newly drafted bill would, in fact, ban Canadians from using the Internet, unless and until a person having a website has a written consent from consumer to use it. According to legal experts, instead of asking consent for online activities, Canada must define operations that are unlawful, such as developing misleading e-mail headers.

Automatic installation of Flash applets, JavaScript and HTML code on the PCs of visitors, would be treated as illegal without the user consent.

While the proposed law is aimed at boosting the confidence of users in e-Commerce by safeguarding personal and private security concerns related to spam, spyware and phishing. Legal critics rejected the bill as "backward" and said that this bill may, in fact, harm several IT firms.

Sookman noted that the new law would make the automatic software updates illegal. In addition to this, it would be illegal for a firm sending e-mail to purchase additional software licenses from a security vendor if it had been 18 month since it had its last business contact. Even the relatively new software developers delivering e-mail queries to those distributors whom they never had a business relation could also be detained.

So according to Sookman, businesses need to restructure their websites so as to force users to click a button in order to get their consent in every download.

Related article: Anti-Spam Laws may not Solve the Problem

» SPAMfighter News - 6/2/2009