Canada announces CASL regulation start date

This morning Industry Canada published its final regulations regarding the implementation of the Canadian Anti-Spam Law. Email related provisions of the law will take effect June 1, 2014.
What does this mean? It means that anyone sending mail from Canada or anyone sending mail that is accessed in Canada is required to have explicit opt-in consent for sending that mail, with a few exceptions. These exceptions include commercial electronic messages that are:

  • sent within an organization;
  • sent between organizations that already have a relationship, where the message concerns the activities of the organization to which the message is sent;
  • sent on platforms where the required identification and unsubscribe information is conspicuously published and readily available to the recipient on the user interface, where duplication in each message would be needlessly repetitious;
  • sent and received within limited access secure and confidential accounts to which only the provider of the account can send messages, such as banking websites;
  • solicited or sent in response to complaints, inquiries, and requests;
  • sent due to a legal or juridical obligation or to enforce a right, legal or juridical obligation, court order, judgment or tariff; to provide notice of an existing or pending right, legal or juridical obligation, court order, judgment or tariff; or to enforce a right arising under a law of Canada, of a province or municipality of Canada, or of a foreign state.
  • sent by or on behalf of registered charities for fundraising purposes; or
  • sent by or on behalf of a political party or organization, or a person who is a candidate—as defined in an Act of Parliament or the legislature of a province—for publicly elected office and the message has as its primary purpose soliciting a contribution as defined in subsection 2(1) of the Canada Elections Act.

Other folks (most of whom live east of me, so got their notices up earlier this morning) have blogged about this as well. CAUCE has a roundup of relevant blog posts.
 

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Canada publishes updated proposed regulations for CASL

Based on initial feedback collected in 2011, updated regulations for CASL have been published by the Industry Canada. Interested stakeholders have until February 4, 2013 to comment on the proposed regulations.
Edit: to identify correct Canadian Govt Agency (Thanks, Neil!)

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What's up with CASL?

Al has a guest post from Kevin Huxham of CakeMail talking about how a majority of people surveyed don’t know anything about the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation.
I have to admit, I’ve not talked about CASL very much here as I’ve been waiting for the implementation and rulemaking. Unfortunately, the implementation date has been pushed back again and again and it doesn’t look like the law will be in effect until 2013.
CASL takes an incredibly narrow look at permission. It prohibits any commercial mail sent without the recipient’s consent to email addresses, social networking accounts and phones (SMS). Not only that, it also prohibits adddress harvesting and installation of computer programs without consent of the owner of the computer.
This law affects all email sent to a Canadian citizens and does allow for private right of action.
I know that a lot of companies that market in Canada have been working out permission issues before the law takes effect. They are also looking at how to comply with the permission requirements for addresses collected after the law goes into effect.
One of the challenges of this law is going to be identifying what addresses are covered. In some cases senders will have physical addresses, but they’re not going to have physical addresses for all addresses. And that may mean that CASL will actually impact more that just Canadian residents.
 
 

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Canadian Law

A anti-spam bill was passed out of committee Monday in Canada. Other than chatting over drinks with a large contingent of Canadians, I haven’t followed the story too closely. However, Matt V. has a detailed summary of the bill at EmailKarma.
Have a great weekend.

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