Advocate-General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Yves Bot’s opinion at the end of last year, on SAS Institute Inc. v. World Programming Ltd., was based on the High Court of England and Wales’ preliminary judgment for the same case. Issued on 29 November 2011, Adv.-Gen. Bot focused on specific provisions of Directives 91/250/EEC […]
It must have been really nice to have worked as an IP expert for the US Trade Representative (USTR) during the 1990s. Almost everything they proposed would become law. The global maximalist agenda had the large international institutions on its side. The golden age of international maximalism saw the creation of the WTO, the TRIPS […]
Earlier this year, the Westminster Magistrates’ Court found that a young British student could be extradited to the United States to face allegations of copyright infringement. The United States Justice Department requested that he be extradited under the Extradiction Act, 2003 and the US-UK Extradition Treaty.
The High Court of Justice’s Technology and Construction Court recently ruled on whether relief could be sought against unknown “seeders” of BitTorrent files in AMP v. Persons Unknown. In June 2008, the claimant AMP either lost or had her cell phone stolen. The phone had a digital camera which had been used to take sexually […]
The idea of surreptitiously recording confidential conversations as material to be used against someone comes straight out of spy movies and thriller novels. The act itself is clearly reprehensible but it is surprisingly difficult to determine whether legal liability subsists. The actual practice of recording conversations without consent is governed by various criminal, privacy and […]
The complicated position that subconscious copying occupies when establishing reproduction and infringement in copyright law was recently highlighted in a key decision by the Patents County Court (PCC) of the UK. In Michael Mitchell v. BBC, Judge Birss’s meticulous judgment focused on whether there existed the possibility of either conscious or subconscious infringement, the latter […]
On December 15, 2011, Advocate General Paolo Mengozzi gave his opinion to the Court of Appeal of England & Wales on whether soccer match schedules could be protected by copyright. This opinion is a companion of sorts, to a ruling of the Court in 2004 that said the “fixture lists” as they are referred to, […]
Alysia Lau is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School who took part in the inaugural offering of the Intellectual Property Law and Technology Intensive Program (IP Intensive) in the Fall of 2011. As part of the course requirements, students were asked to write a blog on a topic of their choice. This past August, […]
Brent Randall is a JD candidate at the University of Ottawa. On December 1, 2011, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales ruled on a case involving English soccer superstar Wayne Rooney and his former agency, Proactive Sports Management Limited, over commission payments. Among five issues the Court decided, the most important involved whether […]
Pauline Wong is the Assistant Director of IP Osgoode. Mekhala Chaubal is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. 2011 will be remembered as a year of social movements and political upheavals in many parts of the world. This trend of transformation and development extended to Canadian and international intellectual property law. As a […]