The academic scientific community conventionally shares research results, ideas and expertise. Not surprisingly, the commoditization of peer reviewed journal articles seems antiquated with cost and accessibility issues when compared with online posting, web-enabled databases, free online journals and guides as knowledge dissemination tools. In the Aug 25, 2008 edition of The Tech, these practices are […]
Recent litigation has shown that misunderstandings relating to the nature of the online public domain are facilitating an increase in online illegal activity. The root of this problem is the presumption that uploading information to the internet makes it part of the ‘public domain’ where ‘ownership’ automatically ceases to exist. If this were unequivocally true, […]
A U.S. appellate court recently held in Jacobsen v. Katzer that copyright holders who dedicate their work for free public use are entitled to enforce an open-source copyright license to restrict the work's future distribution and modification. The Court ruled that open-source licenses are enforceable under copyright law, not merely under contract law, thereby providing […]
German courts recently ruled against Google with regard to two cases involving indexing thumbnails of copyrighted images causing them to display with search results. The infringement cases were brought by a photographer and a comic artist. The Regional Court of Hamburg said that “By using photos in thumbnails, no new work is created” since the thumbnails […]
The New Zealand government has taken a novel approach to try to fix what seems to be a nagging problem for governments in today’s connected world: peer-to-peer file-sharing. On Oct. 3, Associate Commerce Minister Judith Tizard announced that recent copyright amendments will come into force, including a provision (92A) that requires internet service providers to […]
There are rumours that a new copyright bill is imminent. Copyright issues are increasingly gaining public prominence and there are views of every stripe. See below for a distinct view by Barry Sookman, copyright expert and co-chair of the Technology Group at McCarthy Tétrault, on the copyright debate as we await the new legislation and continue […]
According to this story in the Globe and Mail, the music industry is keen on getting Internet service providers (ISPs) to block traffic for users who sharing copyrighted music files. Canadian ISPs like Bell and Rogers already shape traffic to some extent by limiting the amount of bandwidth available to file sharing (and you couldn't […]
The recent closure of AllofMP3 is coming to an end. The site that was closed in July 2007 has recently been reopened under another name and site location. The site that has users pay a flat rate to download music was thought to be in violation of copyright laws in Russia. However, a recent court […]
YouTube, an extremely popular video-sharing site that was created in 2005, is rapidly increasing concerns over video-sharing online free of charge. Right-holders of the videos argue that they are being unfairly deprived of the profits that are due to them. These concerns have actualized into legal actions. Recently, music publishers have joined a group of […]
Being an enthusiastic fan of J.K Rowling’s Potter novels I was infuriated to hear the French student arrested for publishing his own translation of the seventh chapter of the Potter tale would not be prosecuted. An agreement was made with J.K Rowling not to seek damages from the student for violation of intellectual property rights. […]