At dinner the other night, one of my fellow entertainment lawyers was kind enough to gently point out to me that I got something wrong last year when I wrote about "Son of Sam" laws in Canada. After recovering from the shock engendered by learning that someone actually reads this blog, I thought it prudent to take the opportunity to correct myself. As I wrote at the time:
Although it's not precisely the same situation, it's worth noting that there are no "Son of Sam" laws in effect in Canada. The most recent attempt to pass such legislation (which would have had the effect of transferring a convicted criminal's copyright in their writings to the Crown) was, apparently, in 1998, when Liberal MP Tom Wappel tried to get a private member's bill passed the proposed legislation was rejected by a Senate committee, after having passed third reading in the House.
I got that bold part way, way wrong. The only sense in which I was correct was that there was (and remains) no "Son of Sam" law in effect at the federal level. In Ontario, at least, a "Son of Sam" law in indeed on the books: the Prohibiting Profiting from Recounting Crimes Act, 2002, which itself was an effort to update (and which repealed) the Victims' Right to Proceeds of Crime Act, 1994. The act does not appear to have been the subject of a reported decision thus far.
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