A common joke amongst Canadian copyright lawyers goes something like this: What do copyright reform and hot dogs have in common? You don’t want to see how either of them are made. Despite this light-hearted warning, last Thursday IP Osgoode hosted Glen Bloom from Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, who delivered a guest lecture entitled […]
Dr. Michael A. Einhorn is a former member of the Antitrust Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. He is the author of Media Technology and Copyright: Integrating Law and Economics. He is also an independent consultant (dba Media Technology Copyright) in intellectual property and antitrust to parties in media and entertainment. He also teaches […]
Keldeagh Lindsay is a first year law student at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Legal Values: Challenges in Intellectual Property course. Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR) is an amendment of the Patent Act following the 2003 WTO Decision to waive certain intellectual property rights, with the aim of providing low-cost generic pharmaceutical medicines […]
Richard Warman is an Ottawa-based lawyer active in human rights law and is well known for initiating complaints against white supremacists and neo-nazis for Canadian Human Rights Act violations in the realm of the Internet. One of Warman’s most recent targets is the controversial online forum, FreeDominion.ca. In the action, Warman claims damages for allegedly […]
Liberal MP Marlene Jennings has taken it upon herself to re-table her lawful access bill, called the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act (MITA). Bill C-285 proposes to facilitate lawful interception of information transmitted via telecom service providers (TSP). The purpose delineated in the Act is: “… to ensure that [TSPs] have the capability to enable […]
On March 18th, MIT announced that its faculty had unanimously voted to adopt a university wide open access policy. The policy mandates that faculty must make a copy of any scholarly articles they publish available to be included in MIT’s freely accessible online repository. This follows recent similar announcements from Harvard Law School, Harvard Faculty […]
Although copyright issues have consumed the spotlight when it comes to Google Books, a recent thread has suggested that this feature may be of great use when it comes to patent prosecution. More specifically, the suggestion has been that Google Books has potential to become useful for prior art searching undertaken during preparation of a patent […]
Ann Bartow is a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. One of the cases that always troubled me when I taught Trademark Law was Qualitex v. Jacobson Products Co., in which the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that colors alone could constitute protectable trademarks. Colors could always be protected as part […]
Chris Castle is Managing Partner of Christian L. Castle Attorneys, Los Angeles and San Francisco. As Kate Lacey correctly notes in her post, the Google Books settlement creates what is essentially a single purpose private compulsory licensing regime benefiting only Google-assuming the settlement is approved at the upcoming fairness hearing for which the filing deadline […]
Ticket Scalping is getting a lot of attention in Canada lately. In Ontario, Premier Dalton McGuinty made headlines by threatening to introduce legislation to stem TicketMaster’s practice of diverting potential purchasers to its resell site TicketsNow. In Saskatchewan, the Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General recently released (Warning: PDF Link)a discussion paper concerning ‘Ticket […]