Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:45:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090811/0255025840.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090811/0255025840.shtml suing a website that offers advice on how not to get your insurance claim denied. Obviously, for policy holders, this is useful information. But, to ICBC, it's copyright infringement. Well, at least that's what the article linked above says. I have a hard time seeing how there's a copyright claim here -- especially since the ICBC spokesperson states that they don't have a problem with the content, and that they just have to protect their trademark. So... let's give ICBC the benefit of the doubt and assume the newspaper reporter screwed up, and this is actually a trademark claim rather than a copyright claim (professional reporters for the win, again!). Even so, this would seem like a typical "gripes site" type discussion where, as long as it's clear that the site in question is not run by the company, there shouldn't be any problem. In fact, given that the site provides useful information for ICBC customers, it's difficult to see what the problem is, other than that the insurance company doesn't like its policy holders to learn how to stand up for their rights.

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]]> entitlement-culture http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090811/0255025840 Mon, 18 May 2009 04:51:43 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090515/0233034895.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090515/0233034895.shtml Michael Scott, who points us to the news that the Insurance Corporation of B.C. (ICBC) was caught checking its own database to examine the claim histories of potential jurors in a trial in which the company was involved. Not surprisingly, this is a massive breach of Canadian privacy laws and also raises questions about the jury itself. The judge in the case is now trying to find out if ICBC has done this in other cases as well. ICBC seems to be bending over backwards to say this won't happen again and that it's put in place safeguards, but it's not clear why it happened in the first place.

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