by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

An acrimonious legal dispute over a downtown restaurant's right to continue using the name of a deceased local celebrity now threatens to mushroom into a larger test of the rights of families as laid out in a newly worded section of Quebec's Civil Code.

Last February, after jazz bassist Charlie Biddle died, his widow and children won a court injunction ordering George Durst's restaurant to cease using the family name. In the first legal skirmish between the two sides, the House of Jazz, as the restaurant is now known, was found in contempt of court and fined $5,000 for continuing to call itself Biddle's. Durst is appealing that decision.

Biddle's widow explains why they're taking the hard line against the former owner. "A lot of people felt bad when we took the name off the place. People think we're demanding money from [Durst], but this man hadn't paid Charlie for two years for the use of his name," says Constance Biddle.

But when the case returns to court, the restaurant's legal counsel might try to explore the implications of a new wrinkle in Quebec's Civil Code. Previously, Article 35 declared that "no one may invade the privacy of a person without the consent of the person or the person's heirs unless authorized by law." The section referring to "heirs" was recently removed from the law.

Durst's lawyer, Donald Seal, isn't oblivious to the new legal wording. "The law creates a fact that after somebody's death their name is public domain. So basically that's one of the arguments, that after someone is dead you can write about them and talk about them," says Seal. He suspects the change was intended to allow people easier access to information. "In some cases, for example, a poor reporter couldn't get any authority to do research because he'd realize he couldn't check out information of a deceased person without permission of, say, some son in Australia and another in South America," he says.

The Biddle family lawyer feels that the rewording won't apply to their battle to keep their family's name off the famous local jazz landmark. "This is more of a rights of personality issue," says Eric Goyette, "and the Charter of Rights might also be applicable to this case, but I can't go further than that because saying more might jeopardize our case."

It remains unknown what effect the new, revised wording will have on the rights of Quebec families over the lives of bygone family members, but copyright lawyer Laurent Carrière feels that the revision "doesn't change a lot," he says. Flipping through the Civil Code, he rapidly produces and reads out two other sections that he says still protect the rights of heirs to control the names of deceased family members.

"This confirms that the deletion of the word 'heirs' doesn't change anything to the state of the law, but why they made the change, that I don't know."