Stuart Freen is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. This past week Mininova.org, one of the largest public file-sharing sites out there, finally shut its doors. After a legal fight with BREIN (the Dutch music and film industry's anti-piracy arm) earlier this year, Mininova has now removed all infringing torrent files and is […]
Bob Tarantino is a lawyer in the Entertainment Law Group of Heenan Blaikie LLP. He holds graduate degrees in law from Osgoode Hall and the University of Oxford. This is the second part of Bob Tarantino's feature blog post on "performer's performances" in the Canadian Copyright Act. Part One can be read here. In Section […]
Bob Tarantino is a lawyer in the Entertainment Law Group of Heenan Blaikie LLP. He holds graduate degrees in law from Osgoode Hall and the University of Oxford. Thinking of entertainment law as the neglected adoptee of the intellectual property bar provides an apt metaphor. Because it is more an area of practice than a […]
Virgil Cojocaru is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. ‘The Long Tail’, written by Chris Anderson refers to the alleged effect of online stores such as Netflix appealing to smaller niches. Individually these niches do not yield a large profit, but collectively (hence the long part) they can provide a handsome reward. Some […]
There is an interesting debate going on right now between William Patry and Ben Sheffner at the Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars blog. It centres on the verdicts in two recent high-profile p2p trafficking cases launched by RIAA against regular people (Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum). In Thomas-Rasset's case, a jury awarded damages against […]
Despite the ominous verdict from the Swedish court which sentenced The Pirate Bay (TPB) operators to a year in prison and a penalty of US $3.6 million for facilitating copyright infringement, TPB may soon have new life breathed into the service. Global Gaming Factory X, a Swedish software company, has offered to purchase TPB for […]
James Gannon is an Osgoode Hall alumnus and is currently an articling student at McCarthy Tétrault. Much attention has recently been paid to proposed legislation that would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to step up their efforts to prevent subscribers from downloading copyright-protected content through the Internet connections they provide. These initiatives are often described […]
Susan Corbett is a Senior Lecturer in Commercial Law, Victoria University of Wellington In response to a barrage of criticism, unprecedented in response to a topic as alien to the average kiwi as copyright law, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has announced that section 92A of the Copyright Act 1994 will not come into force […]
Sheldon Inkol is a first year law student at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Legal Values: Challenges in Intellectual Property course. According to Julie E. Cohen, the public domain is nowhere. And all around us at the same time. In her article “Copyright, Commodification, and Culture: Locating the Public Domain” (in Guibault, L. & […]
Daniel Pearlman is a first year law student at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Legal Values: Challenges in Intellectual Property course Movie piracy is a widely debated IP issue. While many would agree that movie piracy is a problem, much controversy surrounds both the extent of movie piracy, and how it ought to be […]