Pascale Chapdelaine is a Ph.D. candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and a member of IP Osgoode. Pascale's thesis focuses on the interaction between consumer law and copyright law. What is the consumer entitled to do with musical recordings for her own personal use? Asking this question may appear to some, including consumers, as looking […]
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 […]
Two recent Ontario Superior Court of Justice judgments have allowed for law enforcement agencies to obtain subscriber information from internet service providers without a warrant. In both cases police officers used IP addresses of suspected child pornography carriers, which they had obtained themselves, to get corresponding names and addresses. This has alarmed privacy advocates, and […]
Tony Duarte (B.A., LL.B.) practices exclusively in the area of entertainment law and is an Adjunct Faculty member of Osgoode Hall Law School. Perhaps one of the most problematic rights clearance transactions for a producer of film or television production is the licensing of existing photos, film/video clips, or music to the producer for reuse […]
In response to the growing concerns of illicit use of personal information and corresponding adverse consequences such as identity theft, financial disclosures and private health information revelation, the Office of Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) released a document entitled “Guidelines for Processing Personal Data Across Borders” on January 27, 2009. This document provides guidelines explaining […]
Chris Castle is Managing Partner of Christian L. Castle Attorneys, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Google has reached a settlement of the "Google Books" case brought by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google and several of Google's library business partners in the Google Books enterprise. (The 300-page settlement agreement has […]
The balance between private and public interests is usually the centre of most intellectual property policy debates, but this can be said to be especially significant with medical research performed by publicly funded institutions. In a nation such as ours where the health of our citizens is a responsibility of the government, public funds invested […]
In 2005, Apple publicly announced their transition from the IBM/Motorola PowerPC chipset to the Intel x86 chipset. In addition to the speed improvements, and efficiency gains (higher performance per watt) with the Intel processors, the transition also gave Mac users greater flexibility in the operating systems and programs that could be run without an x86 […]
Lori Drew has been found guilty by a jury in a Federal Circuit Court in California of unauthorized access to a computer system in contravention of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030. The charges were laid after Ms. Drew set up a fake MySpace account posing as a 16 year old […]
E-mail emerged as an informal and humble means of electronic global communication. Now ubiquitous in business communications and transactions, e-mail is on the verge of becoming a key mover and shaker of modern day contract law. One of the most important features of a contract is offer and acceptance, which is often referred to as […]