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 […]
The contentious issue addressed in the recent Intellectual Property Colloquium, hosted by Professor Doug Lichtman of the UCLA School of Law, was the way the courts calculate patent damages. As the debate over the U.S. patent reform continues, Professor Lichtman has made available a series of excerpts from the Senate and the Federal Trade Commission […]
Creative Commons (“CC”) is a non-profit corporation “dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.” CC provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, […]
Despite the fact the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the United States fashion design industry, relative to other innovative sectors such as computing, music, television and film, may seem non-existent, fashion accounts for $200 billion in sales annually in the U.S. Two prominent legal scholars, Kal Raustiala and Christopher Springman, have written a series […]
Giovanni Maria Riccio is Professor of Private Comparative Law at the University of Salerno. Professor Riccio is an IP Osgoode Research Affiliate. The French Constitutional Court held that the “Creation and Internet” law – the law promoted by the Olivennes Commission and strictly supported by the President Sarkozy – is unconstitutional. This Act – whose […]
The dispute between Microsoft Corporation and the defendants, PC Village Markham, PC Village Downtown – two software retailers in the Greater Toronto Area – and two of their employees, Syed Aziz and Johnson Ye, arose because the defendants were selling counterfeit Microsoft software, “software that was neither manufactured by Microsoft nor by any of its […]
My first experience with intellectual property occurred several years ago when I watched a documentary on the patents on the genes BRCA1 and 2. Individuals with certain types of mutations within these genetic sequences are at a significantly higher risk for developing hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. Despite knowing little about both genetics and law at the […]
Catherine Bond is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia. IceTV Pty Limited v Nine Network Australia Pty Limited [2009] HCA 14 In mid-2008, when the High Court of Australia granted special leave to appeal in the copyright case IceTV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd, […]
The controversial doctrine of inequitable conduct has once again garnered much attention in the patent law community due to the recent denial of certiorari by the US Supreme Court in Aventis Pharma v. Amphastar. The doctrine of inequitable conduct allows courts to exercise equitable discretion to find a patent unenforceable if the applicant has failed to exercise his or […]
Although a patent is typically seen as a right to exclude others, the willingness of American courts to automatically provide that right through a permanent or preliminary injunction has been affected by the Supreme Court of the United States in Ebay v. MercExchange (547 U.S. 388 (2006)). In a recent article, Prof. Richard Epstein argues […]