On Fri, 13 Oct 1995, Brad Shantz wrote:

I just arrived in Ottawa, Canada from Seattle, USA. I had sort of Wellcome to Ottawa.

Anyway, i got to customs in Ottawa, and they asked me if I had anything to declare. I immediately thought, "Should I tell them about the notebook?" I decided against it. How does export of intellectual property work?

Don't worry about it, Canada's not even a foreign country according to ITAR. If you have pgp on that machine, you haven't exported it, but it's still covered by export controls. We pretty much have exactly the same export restrictions on US origin software, but if it comes from anywhere else (including Canada of course) it can be exported without a permit to all but four countries (iran, cuba and two others) and cannot be exported at all to UN embargoed countries (bosnia, iraq, angola...). Since none of these have good net access, it's not much of a prob. The issue of whether ftp is an export hadn't resolved when I asked, and there might be a headache regarding US intellectual property and that US origin problem. So basically you can't export pgp, nautilus, rsaref..., but if they were rewritten from the ground up in Canada and put on the net, you *might* be ok. (that ignores the last issue, so ask Foreign Affairs and maybe a lawyer first, though I really can't see how a public domain idea can have a nationality) ElGamal and IDEA would be completely without problems as they are not even American intellectual property. Of course, I'm not a lawyer, and the gov has no obligation to agree with the advice of its own employees. If you're interested I could mail you the address and phone no. of the export controls division of external affairs. The policy officer was rather helpful. They also have a big booklet on export controls. If you plan on going over, might as well ask about the American citizenship problem that's come up in the Anguila thread. Sounds very funny. (of course that would say nothing about the US State Dept's opinion on it)