On September 8, 2008, a New York federal court ruled that Steven Vander Ark is permanently enjoined from publishing his ‘Harry Potter Lexicon’. The Lexicon is an A to Z encyclopedia that consists of 2437 entries. The entries describe the creatures, characters, objects, events and places that exist in the world of Harry Potter. The […]
Last month, the SCC refused leave to appeal from the FCA’s decision in Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association v. SOCAN. The FCA had undertaken the judicial review of a tariff decision by the Copyright Board. The tariff covered the communication of musical works, in the form of cell phone ringtones, from suppliers to subscribers. At issue […]
I am delighted to be returning to Osgoode as Professor of Intellectual Property Law after a decade at the University of Oxford as the Reuters Professor of Intellectual Property & Information Technology Law and Director of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre. The draw was Osgoode's establishment of a program devoted to research in IP […]
The New Zealand government has taken a novel approach to try to fix what seems to be a nagging problem for governments in today’s connected world: peer-to-peer file-sharing. On Oct. 3, Associate Commerce Minister Judith Tizard announced that recent copyright amendments will come into force, including a provision (92A) that requires internet service providers to […]
Social networking has taken on a new dimension at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It has been over a year since the USPTO, in collaboration with New York Law School, initiated the Peer-to-Patent Pilot, a venture designed to bring the benefits of peer review to the patent application process. If the decision […]
A recent tainted milk disaster in China has killed at least three infants and made thousands of others sick. Several countries have banned or recalled Chinese dairy products in response. Economic and health experts are still trying to measure the impact of the melamine contamination. But with allegations of cover-ups and corruption, this catastrophe raises […]
The definition of the boundaries of art, and the privileges of the people who produce ever-evolving art forms, have historically been contentious issues among the general public, however, household and classroom debates typically remained outside of the realm of copyrights. A recent article from the National Post spoke of a case where a photographer of graffiti […]
On September 25, 2008, VANOC (The Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee) held a press conference to announce the new slogan for the XXI Olympic Winter Games and the X Paralympic Winter Games to be held in 2010 in Vancouver and Whistler. VANOC boss John Furlong asserted that the motto is decided with an attempt to "touch […]
With the proliferation of open source web collaboration tools such as SourceForge, Wikipedia, and blogs, important concerns have been raised regarding a tool users’ ability to restrict the content they create. At the heart of the debate is whether a work, released for free public use, can still have restrictions attached via an open source […]