Ariel Katz is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto. Ariel holds the Innovation Chair in Electronic Commerce and is the Director of the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy of the University of Toronto. With the Public Copyright Consultations moving full steam ahead, various stake-holders raise proposals for expanding […]
Patricia Aufderheide is a Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington. She is also the Director of the Center for Social Media. The U.S. doctrine of fair use is getting a healthy workout, and it seems like every challenge is making it stronger. In fact, fair use is becoming a very […]
Infopaq, founded in Denmark in 1998, is a media monitoring and analysis company. One of their services is the monitoring of keywords that appear in newspaper text. To achieve this, Infopaq scans newspaper pages and the uses software to turn the image of the page into text. If pre-determined keywords that clients want monitored appear […]
European Union Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding is planning to overhaul Internet downloading policies in order to facilitate simple, consumer friendly, and legal access to music and films online. Her response to a recent survey, showing 60% of people between ages 16-24 as downloaders of illegal audiovisual content, is that “internet piracy appears to become more […]
The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in the United Kingdom holds the most extensive collection of portraits in the world. Over the past five years, the gallery has been working on its £1 million project of digitising its entire collection for viewing online. In addition to the low resolution images of the complete works, the NPG […]
Canada’s Copyright Act was enacted in 1924. It went through a series of changes throughout 1990s, with the last amendment being in 1997. In 2001 the Federal government initiated a public consultation but it went nowhere. The last two attempts of the government to modify the act were in 2005 and 2007 when the Federal […]
Despite the ominous verdict from the Swedish court which sentenced The Pirate Bay (TPB) operators to a year in prison and a penalty of US $3.6 million for facilitating copyright infringement, TPB may soon have new life breathed into the service. Global Gaming Factory X, a Swedish software company, has offered to purchase TPB for […]
Roger S. Fisher, Ph.D., LL.B. teaches a course on copyright policy at York University to third year Fine Arts students. He is a member of the Bar of Ontario and currently represents a non-profit academic journal that is one of over two hundred third- and fourth-party defendants in a class action lawsuit involving a copyright […]
There have been criticisms of the European Parliament elections from various quarters. These criticisms range from a consistently declining voter turnout and lack of enthusiasm for the election of Members of the European Parliament to the ability of “fringe” political parties to gain a seat due to their ability to convert fanatical energy for a […]
A few months ago I got an email from Blogger.com regarding a blog I run in my spare time. It read: “Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog infringes upon the copyrights of others.” Blogger had taken down a post that […]