Brandon Evenson is a 2010 JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. He holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Queen’s University. Prior to attending Osgoode, Mr. Evenson consulted for some of the world’s leading technology firms in the area of contract risk and licensing compliance. Last Thursday, IP Osgoode hosted Chris Castle, managing partner […]
Marsha Cadogan is a Ph.D candidate at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Intellectual Property Theory course. Personality interest in Music Copyright - Commentary on Professor David D. Troutt's article "I Own Therefore I Am: Copyright, Personality, and Soul Music in the Digital Commons" (Professor Troutt's article is forthcoming in the Fordham Intellectual Property Journal.) Troutt’s article […]
The Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) continues to set forth its proposal of a levy on iPods and other digital audio recording devices. The CPCC is a non-profit agency that collects and distributes the private copying royalties to songwriters, performers, publishers and producers. Since 2000, the CPCC has been collecting levies ranging between 21 and […]
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 […]
Graham Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, a member of Dalhousie Law School's Law and Technology Institute and the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Technology. He is also an IP Osgoode Research Affiliate. Have you ever wanted to see Metric's […]
42 years after playing the memorable organ solo on "A Whiter Shade of Pale", ex-Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher has finally been awarded a share of the song's royalties. Despite penning the melody from the British band's most popular song, Fisher was never acknowledged as one of the song's authors. Now, in one of the […]
Open core licensing, also known as commercial extensions, is a licensing regime that offers core components for free, but charges licensees for additional premium products. The approach is a twist on the dual licensing approach where the vendor, as copyright holder, makes the source code freely available, but also offers the same code under a […]
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 […]
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 […]
Michael Jackson's death has the surviving members of the Beatles in knots. Not only because they just lost a fellow musician and entertainment icon, but also because Jackson's untimely death has left his estate mired in legal complexities regarding the future ownership of the publishing rights of the Beatles' catalogue. As co-owner of Sony/ATV Music […]