The following is based on the Globe and Mail article “Major companies agree to make anti-pollution patents public,” by Martin Mittelstadedt. Since January 2008 patents developed with the goal of fighting pollution have been put into the public domain by a growing number of large companies, such as DuPont and Xerox. Dubbed the “eco-patent commons,” […]
In the past courts have drawn a distinction between trade secrets that were tangible or written and those that were retained in memory, offering protection for the former. That is, if employees held in their memory certain secret information from a previous job, they were able to disseminate or use said information with impunity in […]
The United States Congress rescued citizens in the state of Montana from a Las Vegas businessman who attempted to expropriate, albeit legally via trademark registration, one of their cherished assets: a slogan “The Last Best Place”. They achieved the right result, but I think they went about it incorrectly. Congress blocked the possibility of trademark […]
In March 2007 Viacom filed a $1 Billion lawsuit alleging that YouTube “actively engage[s] in, promote[s] and induce[s] [copyright] infringement”. Viacom properties such as South Park, Mean Girls and An Inconvenient Truth have been posted on YouTube.[1] For their part, YouTube has asserted a seemingly ironclad defense: Under Section 202 of the Digital Millennium Copyright […]
This summer, following threats of litigation by Hasbro, owner of the Scrabble board game’s copyright, the popular Facebook application Scrabulous was shut down, reworked, and relaunched as Wordscraper, featuring a new layout, design, and scoring system. In the aftermath of these events, many Facebook users and content creators are confused. Creators are wondering to what […]
Can workplace information retained in a person’s memory constitute a trade secret? Until recently the answer was no, with courts applying trade secret protection to documents removed from an employer but not to those recreated from a former employee’s memory. However, the Ohio Supreme Court recently reversed this rule in Al Minor & Assoc., Inc. […]
In August 2008, New Zealand judge, Justice David Harvey, made a ruling banning the publication of the names of two men who were charged with murder, on news websites. His main concern was the ability of jurors to Google the names of defendants before trials, and easily access information on their past criminal history. He […]
“Scrabulous” a game similar to the board game Scrabble was launched online, and made available to Facebook users as an add-on game, by its creators the Agarwalla’s in 2006. By all accounts Scrabulous was almost identical to Scrabble in appearance (same colour of board), rules and name. In 2008, Hasbro, who own the intellectual property […]
Last May in Brandon, Manitoba, police charged a high-school student with criminal personation after he set up a Facebook profile in his teacher’s name. The charge was laid on the conviction that the profile “contained enough information to cause some disadvantage to the teacher”. Under the Criminal Code it is well established that impersonation alone […]
What probably started as a silly prank could turn into criminal charges of personation against a high school student from Brandon, Manitoba, who set up a phony Facebook profile in his teacher’s name that included the teacher’s photo and biographical details.1 Although in the end, these criminal charges will probably be nothing more than a […]