Stu Freen is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. As details of Conan O’Brien’s severance deal with NBC leak out, it seems that at least one thing won’t be travelling with Conan to wherever he ends up: His signature characters and comedy bits. NBC has reportedly staked out the IP rights in classic […]
Lorraine Fleck is a Toronto, Canada lawyer and trade-mark agent who practices advertising and marketing, information technology, intellectual property and packaging and labeling law at Hoffer Adler LLP. The Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BIA) and Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) were recently amended. One of the amendments provides IP licensees with more certainty regarding the […]
Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman ‘74 Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Samuelson has a new article available on SSRN, “Google Book Search and the Future of Books in Cyberspace" (forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review). The Google Book Search (GBS) initiative once promised to […]
Bob Tarantino is a lawyer in the Entertainment Law Group of Heenan Blaikie LLP. He holds graduate degrees in law from Osgoode Hall and the University of Oxford. This is the second part of Bob Tarantino's feature blog post on "performer's performances" in the Canadian Copyright Act. Part One can be read here. In Section […]
Virgil Cojocaru is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Professor Emir Aly Crowne-Mohammed and Yonatan Rozenszajn argue in their article, DRM Roll Please: Is Digital Rights Management Legislation Unconstitutional in Canada? that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) Provisions in Bill C-61 are ultra vires (Latin for "beyond the powers") of Parliament’s power under […]
Alex Gloor is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. At first glance, the century old doctrine of first-sale seems simple enough. However, as with many other IP doctrines, the digital world has thrown a wrench in this otherwise well-understood principle (see this post on a similar topic). In the case of Vernor v. […]
Virgil Cojocaru is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. ‘The Long Tail’, written by Chris Anderson refers to the alleged effect of online stores such as Netflix appealing to smaller niches. Individually these niches do not yield a large profit, but collectively (hence the long part) they can provide a handsome reward. Some […]
A recent appeal initiated by the University of Western Australia (UWA) was dismissed by the full Federal Court of Australia, which upheld the decision to place intellectual property rights into the hands of academics, and not the institutions that employ them. The case of University of Western Australia v. Gray involved a particular invention developed […]
On 11 August 2009, a U.S. District Court in California ruled that RealDVD, RealNetwork's software that enables users to copy DVDs for personal storage on hard drives, was in violation of U.S. copyright law. In light of the evidence that RealDVD circumvented anti-piracy protection requirements set out in law, Judge Marylin Patel granted the DVD […]
42 years after playing the memorable organ solo on "A Whiter Shade of Pale", ex-Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher has finally been awarded a share of the song's royalties. Despite penning the melody from the British band's most popular song, Fisher was never acknowledged as one of the song's authors. Now, in one of the […]