Trudo Lemmens is Associate Professor at the Faculties of Law and Medicine of the University of Toronto, and a member of the Joint Centre for Bioethics and the Centre for Ethics. Medical research is increasingly relying on biobanks, large repositories of human biological material and related health information. These can be best conceived as elaborate […]
Bob Tarantino is a lawyer in the Entertainment Law Group of Heenan Blaikie LLP. He holds graduate degrees in law from Osgoode Hall Law School and the University of Oxford. A filmmaker films an individual walking down a city street, past a convenience store. The camera captures, among others, two things: an advertisement consisting of […]
Brandon Evenson is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Most advertisements are disappointing. They suffer from gimmicky jingles, exaggerated punchlines, and fake endorsements. Yet every once-in-a-while there comes an ad that is witty, sophisticated, and original. Such an ad, more often than not, parodies popular culture. But what happens when the ad runs […]
Nirav Bhatt is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. The much deliberated topic of making education easily accessible and available for no cost is indeed coming closer to reality, with a huge increase in the number of students using OpenCourseWare. With institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and M.I.T making learning materials easily accessible online, there is a great […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. Almost five years ago, the Authors Guild launched a class action lawsuit against Google over what was then called the Google Library Project. This led to the controversial 2008 Google Book Settlement, which has been one of the major hot issues in […]
Roger S. Fisher, Ph.D., J.D. teaches courses at York University on law, humanities and copyright policy. He is a member of the Bar of Ontario and is currently working on a project entitled “Antigone Rests Her Case: Law, Legal Discourses and Discourse Shifting in Sophocles’ Antigone.” The law has always had an uneasy relationship with […]
Richard Owens is counsel in a Toronto law firm specializing in business and commercial law, intellectual property and technology. This short comment analyses the results of the Government of Canada’s recent on-line public consultation on its planned reform of copyright laws, held from July 20th, 2009 to September 15th, 2009. Defects in the Consultation process […]
George Nathanael is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. On April 1st the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided in favour of eBay (for the most part) in their case against Tiffany and Company. The case revolved around the advertisements that eBay had placed for Tiffany jewellery being sold on […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Normally when a consumer purchases a copyrighted work embodied in a tangible object (e.g., a book or a CD) they are completely free to lend or resell that object without the permission of the rightsholder. In the United States, this is called the doctrine […]
Ashlee Froese is an Osgoode Hall alumnus and currently practices intellectual property at the law firm of Keyser Mason Ball LLP. The “.co” domain name has long been a favourite of cybersquatters and typosquatters alike, individuals who profit off the misdirection of online traffic/consumers who intend to visit a specific brand’s online space [for example, […]