Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. Can someone own facts? According to the US “hot news” doctrine, the answer is – sorta. Under certain circumstances, a news gathering organization can receive “quasi-property” rights in facts against allegedly free-riding competitors. As neither property nor copyright, the rarely used hot […]
Tamsin Thomas is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and is taking the Patent Law class. At the beginning of March 2010, Greenpeace Germany and others unsuccessfully challenged a patent on a method of increasing milk supply in cattle. Cattle can be made to produce larger amounts of milk when they are genetically […]
Nathan Fan is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. On March 23, 2010, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) released its long-awaited decision over Google’s sale of trademark keywords in its AdWords service and the resulting litigious skirmish with various trademark owners in France (this French skirmish was covered in a previous IPilogue […]
Nirav Bhatt is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. China’s economic progress is coming in leaps and bounds, be it rapid development of infrastructure or moving at a rate much faster than its counterparts. But the recent Google-China controversy raises concerns about whether this will cause major problems for China in the long run. […]
Geraldine Soon is an exchange student at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Patent Law course. At the Standing Commmittee on the Law of Patents’ (SCLP) 13th session in March 2009, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)’s secretariat established a preliminary study on the “exceptions from patentable subject matter and limitations to the rights, inter […]
Kevin Osborne is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and is taking the Patent Law course. Earlier this month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) confirmed Amazon.com’s controversial 1-Click patent (PDF) following a re-examination of newly-submitted prior art (via TechFlash). This re-examination sheds light on the difference between the novelty and obviousness […]
Nassim Nasser is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and is taking the Patent Law course. Microsoft Corporation was, yet again, defeated when the United States Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit upheld the trial’s court’s decision in favour of the Toronto based software company i4i Limited Partnership (i4i). The dispute between […]
Stuart Freen is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. On Tuesday, March 16, IP Osgoode and the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security jointly hosted the Workshop on Media Suppression. Held at the Schulich School of Business on York University campus, the workshop was split into two halves: Livelihood (chaired […]
Nathan Fan is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. At this year’s Canadian Music Week International Breakfast event, Jaron Lanier had a few moments to call upon his audience of fellow music industry top thinkers and executives to consider this question: “What happens when we stop shaping technology and it starts shaping us?” […]
Brandon Evenson is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. The United States Supreme Court recently decided the case of Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, holding that § 411(a) of the Copyright Act is not jurisdictional. At issue were the rights of freelance authors in their unregistered works. This case is part of the aftermath […]