Professor Jane C. Ginsburg will be at Osgoode Hall Law School on Monday, October 6 (2:30PM to 4:30PM) to give a presentation entitled: “The U.S. Supreme Court’s Aereo decision and the U.S.’ international obligation to implement the ‘making available right’: Are we there yet?”. Click here for details. RSVP today to attend the talk! For […]
On September 4, the Supreme Court of Canada granted leave to appeal from the Federal Court of Appeal in CBC v SODRAC 2003 Inc which considered the issue of whether broadcasters must pay royalties on ephemeral or incidental copies of an audiovisual work created during the preparation of that work for broadcast. The case arose out […]
The “making available” right, as articulated in the WIPO Copyright Treaty art. 8 (and the WPPT arts. 10 and 14), applies to the offering to the public of on-demand access to a work in the form of a stream or of a download. The “umbrella solution” adopted at the 1996 Diplomatic Conference that yielded the […]
The culture industries appear to be at a crossroads. Shifting advertising practices as well as audience viewing and consumption habits continue to contribute to new challenges and opportunities for media and entertainment providers throughout the world. With its new “A Space for All of Us” strategy, Canada’s national public broadcaster – the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada […]
On July 18, 2014, the world of everyone who streams music or videos containing music – that is, almost everyone who uses the internet – changed a little bit. On that date, the Copyright Board released a decision certifying two tariffs proposed by the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). These […]
In Parts I and II of this series of blog posts, I discussed the ongoing digital copyright reform in Hong Kong. Specifically, I called for the transplant of the Canadian UGC exception to the jurisdiction, as part of an effort to enlarge the creative, political, social and cultural space of individual internet users.Since the last blog post, the Hong […]
Marvel may have to call in The Avengers for help with this one. The comic giant filed papers on July 14th arguing to the U.S. Supreme Court that it should not review the Second Circuit appeal court’s decision in Marvel Characters, Inc. v Kirby. The case concerned whether the estate of legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby […]
Last week, the big news in the video game blogosphere was the reported sale of the world’s largest video game collection, comprising over 11,000 games, for more than $750,000 at auction. While the most salient fact of this story may be the magnitude of both the collection and the winning bid, the large numbers obscure a […]
For the first time in some twenty years, Canada’s copyright law framework is set for the foreseeable future. Previous attempts (in 2005, 2008, and 2010) to update the country’s copyright legislation for contemporary realities were stalled or aborted due to the problematics of successive minority governments during the mid-2000s. After attaining a parliamentary majority in 2011, the […]
Whether you grew up an avid comic-book fan, or just plan on seeing X-Men: Days of Future Past (recently released on May 23, 2014) as well as Avengers: Age of Ultron (scheduled for release on May 1, 2015), you might just “Hulk out” when you see two different Quicksilvers in each film. However, this doesn’t implicate a plot line […]