A recent pronouncement by Associated Press (AP) to adopt a more aggressive effort to “fend off copycat competition and “misappropriation” in the dwindling market for timely reporting,” has stirred the online news-outlet community and its players. In his capacity as the CEO of MediaNews Group Inc., and the Chairman of Associated Press board of directors, […]
Adam Bucci is a first year law student at Osgoode Hall taking the “Legal Values: Challenges in Intellectual Property” course. I would like to address the impact that open source software has had on our intellectual property regime. In this post, I will: (i) outline some strong claims for significantly diluting – if not wholly […]
Brian Higgins is a first year law student at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Legal Values: Challenges in Intellectual Property course. David Lametti’s 2001 article, “Publish and Profit?: Justifying the Ownership of Copyright in the Academic Setting”, details the intricacies of copyright ownership in a university setting ((2001), 26 Queen’s L.J. 497 – 567). […]
In 2007, Dan Heller, a freelance photographer, filed a proposal with the US Copyright Office. The proposal urged for the creation of a system of privately-run ‘Copyright Registrars’. The proposal describes a universal online system where a large number of private companies would be involved in the processing of copyright registration of original works. The […]
In a recent blog article, Kevin Kelly proposes that ownership is not as important as it once was and discusses the many benefits of renting, leasing, licensing and sharing compared to owning. Kelly discusses this notion both in the context of tangible goods and intangible goods. In the article, Kelly is extremely thorough about listing […]
Sara Grimes is a PhD Candidate with the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Digital games have evolved considerably in recent years, but from an IP perspective, one of the most interesting and significant shifts has been the introduction of user-generated content (UGC) into corporately-owned digital games and virtual worlds. Early evidence of the […]
In George Nathanael’s post titled “Protecting Graffiti Artists”, he proposed that withholding copyright protection for graffiti is the best response to the question of whether creators of graffiti should be protected the same way as other artists who create murals on their own property. The dilemma of rewarding someone who created a work of art in […]
In 2006, Jason Fortuny was posting a fake ad on Craigslist. He pretended to be a 27 –year-old female bondage enthusiast. She (Jason) was looking for a “white or latin man … to give intensive pain and discipline.” Fortuny then collected the replies, 178 in total (145 of them with pictures of men showing them […]
As a result of the recent proliferation of social networking sites, a debate has emerged over the media’s ability to use photos added to user profiles, in the absence of express permission granted by the owner. Exacerbating this issue was a recent incident where all four of Toronto’s daily newspapers published articles regarding the murder […]
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, […]