Bob Tarantino is a lawyer in the Entertainment Law Group of Heenan Blaikie LLP. He holds graduate degrees in law from Osgoode Hall Law School and the University of Oxford. A suitable name for an entertainment project can be critical to its success and can even enhance the aesthetic effect of the overall work. In […]
Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman ‘74 Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Samuelson has a new article available on SSRN, “Google Book Search and the Future of Books in Cyberspace” (forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review). The Google Book Search (GBS) initiative once promised to […]
Billy Barnes is a JD Candidate at the University of Toronto. The Australian government recently rejected a recommendation by the Productivity Commission to repeal the Copyright Act’s parallel import restrictions. Parallel import restrictions, which exist in most English-speaking countries including Canada, prevent the importation of copyrighted works without the consent of the local rightsholder. Australia’s […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Last Friday, Google filed a revised settlement agreement for the class action law suit regarding its Google Book Search service. The settlement addresses many complaints directed at the original proposed settlement in October 2008. The two most important of these are the handling of […]
Brandon Evenson is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Given Google’s internet footprint, it would be easy for any web surfer to mistakenly conclude that Google is out to rule the online world. These surfers must be reminded, however, that Google’s true mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible […]
On May 6, 2009, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger launched an initiative to make available free digital textbooks for high school students. California’s Secretary of Education, Glen Thomas, was responsible for ensuring that digital resources were available for use in high school math and science classes this September. According to Governor Schwarzenegger, California’s budget crisis motivated […]
Back in November 2008, I wrote about the challenges that Google faced in their Google Books Library Project and their proposed settlement in response. To refresh, the Google Books Library Project is a hugely ambitious initiative to catalogue the millions of books in the collections of several major libraries and include them into Google Book […]
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 […]
Stephen Sharon is a recent graduate of Touro Law School in New York where he focused on intellectual property. Stephen was also the first place winner of the Nathan Burkan Memorial Competition sponsored by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) for his submission of a case study about the legal battle between […]
The paperless office is yet to arrive, but that hasn’t stopped companies from introducing innovative ways of consuming written materials. One such attempt is Amazon.com’s e-book, called ‘Kindle’. When first released in late 2007, I looked at how purchasers of content for the device may be limited in their ability to re-sell their copy of […]