Dan Whalen is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School Earlier this month, a Québec court upheld a 2008 US judgment ordering self-styled “online marketer” Adam Guerbuez to pay over $1-billion (CAD) to Facebook, Inc. Guerbuez, a Montreal resident, was tried in absentia in California for allegedly pilfering Facebook users’ personal information to flood […]
Nathan Fan is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School Despite the multi-billion dollar success J.K. Rowling has achieved with her Harry Potter franchise (or perhaps in light of that success), Rowling has been unable to side-step copyright infringement lawsuits. On 14 October 2010, Justice Kitchin of London’s High Court held that plagiarism allegations […]
Lionel Bently, the Herschel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge, and a member of IP Osgoode's International Advisory Council, has co-edited a collection of 15 essays on the history of copyright law, entitled Privilege and Property: Essays on the […]
Tiffany Wong is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School Previously on IPilogue, I discussed the U.S. Senate race between Harry Reid and Sharron Angle, who are both embroiled in copyright litigation. Hypothetically, these parties could succeed in raising different copyright defences in Canada. Senate Majority Leader Reid is being sued by Angle for […]
Matt Lonsdale is a JD Candidate at Dalhousie University Last week the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) released its Annual Report to Parliament on the Privacy Act. A recurring theme is the friction at the nexus between individual privacy interests, national security concerns, and technological advances. In the Commissioner’s opening statement, she […]
Carys Craig is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School Michael Geist’s edited collection of essays on copyright reform is being released on October 14th, and you are welcome to attend its launch. This exciting and timely publication, entitled ‘From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda’, contains twenty chapters […]
James Gannon is a lawyer at McCarthy Tétrault LLP; he blogs at jamesgannon.ca One of the federal government’s main stated objectives in enacting Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act,[1] is to implement the rights and protections for authors, performers and sound recording makers found in the WIPO Internet Treaties[2].[3] Bill C-32 would amend the Canadian […]
Stuart Freen is a J.D. candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School A Texas jury awarded $625.5 million in damages against Apple Inc. on October 1st, finding that the computer giant wilfully infringed three patents with its Spotlight, Time Machine, and Cover Flow software. The patents were held by Mirror Worlds, a corporation founded by Yale […]
Rachel Migicovsky is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, Traditional Knowledge (TK) is “knowledge which has a traditional link with a certain community: it is … developed, sustained and passed on within a traditional community, and…between generations”. The introduction of TRIPS in 1994, a WTO agreement […]
Ivy Tsui is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School Granting trade-marks to outré elements such as sound, smell, shape, taste, and texture has long been considered unconventional. However, as Professor David Vaver has foreseen, today’s “unconventional” trade-marks may become the “conventional” trade-marks of tomorrow.[1] In recent years, the practice of trade-marking sounds has […]