On May 19, Blizzard Entertainment, developer of popular games Diablo 3 and StarCraft II, filed a lawsuit against the developers of the ValiantChaos MapHack, an unauthorized program created for use with the StarCraft II computer game. The online gaming community is split over whether Blizzard is in the right; it seems that one of the only […]
And so the sparring will go another round. On May 19th the United States Supreme Court delivered its decision on Patrella v Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, allowing Paula Petrella to pursue her copyright infringement claim against MGM Studios despite her decision to wait 18 years to file suit. As a result, the Supreme Court has essentially informed the […]
In Kristina Hill, Brian Edwards and Thomas Privitere v Public Advocate of the United States, a homosexual couple who had posted an engagement photo on their blog were devastated to discover that the image had been used in two political advertisements that opposed same-sex marriage. After realizing the advertisements had been sent to several thousand […]
There are just under two months left to submit your entry to our 6th annual Canada’s IP Writing Challenge. The winner from each category will receive a prize of $1000 (CAD), publication on the IP Osgoode website, and consideration for publication in the Canadian Intellectual Property Review and/or the Intellectual Property Journal. The deadline to […]
In the recent case of Cinar Corporation v Robinson, the Supreme Court of Canada considered the scope of copyright in a children’s television show. The defendants’ show, Robinson Sucroë, was, frankly, so similar in its essential elements to that developed by plaintiff Claude Robinson that few people, if any, were surprised by the Court’s finding […]
Susan Abramovitch, a partner at Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP and the Head of the firm’s Entertainment Law Practice, will be speaking on two panels this Saturday at Canadian Music Week (CMW) to discuss Canada’s copyright regime and recent developments in Canadian music law and business, and their impact on the Canadian music industry. IP Osgoode had […]
This past March, Toronto hosted the 55th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA). This year’s ISA Annual Convention brought together over 5300 scholars, practitioners, and students to discuss “Geopolitics in an Era of Globalization”. As intellectual property-based industries become increasingly implicated in global economic, social, cultural, and political discussions, copyright issues are becoming more […]
Creating YouTube videos incorporating copyright protected works is a commonplace, often amateur pursuit of today’s tech-savvy cultural ‘consumers’ and no one is making money off of it, right?… Wrong!
There is currently a live, ongoing legal dispute in California between former and current student athletes (SAs) and the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) which reveals that regulations defining collegiate eligibility did not foresee the nexus of new media technology and sport. Consequently, NCAA bylaws do not consider the effects of athlete intellectual property on […]
When I first read the Supreme Court of Canada’s landmark decision in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada concerning the concept of originality in copyright law, I thought something was amiss. According to the Copyright Act, copyright shall subsist in every original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work; however, “original” is not […]