July 29, 2008 was a day of mourning for half a million procrastinators around the world. It was the day Scrabulous, a notoriously popular application on Facebook, was removed from the networking site. The withdrawal was prompted by a lawsuit launched by Hasbro, the US copyright owners of Scrabble. Hasbro cited Scrabulous’ developers, Jayant and […]
For years, if you registered a .ca domain, anyone could see your name, address and email in online “whois” databases. In 2008, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) restricted access to this information. Internet law guru Michael Geist hailed early drafts of the CIRA’s new whois policy as “a model for domain name registries around […]
Last May in Brandon, Manitoba, police charged a high-school student with criminal personation after he set up a Facebook profile in his teacher’s name. The charge was laid on the conviction that the profile “contained enough information to cause some disadvantage to the teacher”. Under the Criminal Code it is well established that impersonation alone […]
Our society has become increasingly accustomed to concepts of sharing through the use of the internet. Whether it is sharing photos on facebook or music on limewire we are in an age of rapid-fire sharing. A group of scientists, many of whom are in the Boston area, have extended the sharing concept to the field […]
What probably started as a silly prank could turn into criminal charges of personation against a high school student from Brandon, Manitoba, who set up a phony Facebook profile in his teacher's name that included the teacher's photo and biographical details.1 Although in the end, these criminal charges will probably be nothing more than a […]
The academic scientific community conventionally shares research results, ideas and expertise. Not surprisingly, the commoditization of peer reviewed journal articles seems antiquated with cost and accessibility issues when compared with online posting, web-enabled databases, free online journals and guides as knowledge dissemination tools. In the Aug 25, 2008 edition of The Tech, these practices are […]
As a result of the recent proliferation of social networking sites, a debate has emerged over the media’s ability to use photos added to user profiles, in the absence of express permission granted by the owner. Exacerbating this issue was a recent incident where all four of Toronto’s daily newspapers published articles regarding the murder […]
Digital locks[DLs] are ‘virtual fences’ put around digital content.1 An example is a password authorizing the access to an online music store such as iTunes. The government, through legislation, has the responsibility to discourage abuses of DLs. There are at least two types of DLs abuses that harm society. The first involves the actions of users […]
Whilst counterfeits are easily recognizable, the issue is the line between inspiration and knock-offs in the fashion industry. In this article, designers and IP lawyers differ on where this line should be drawn. I shall analyse these views and propose where IP law could draw the line. Is IP needed here? Theoretically, IP rewards “true” […]
In “(Digital) Locks are multipurpose tools, and can be used or abused”, Rusell McOrmond makes the distinction between digital locks on content, such as mechanisms on audio CDs that prevent users from “ripping” songs to external devices, and digital locks on devices, which only allows devices to play certain types of content. He argues that […]