On September 25th earlier this year, California became the third state in the US, following Nevada and Florida, to pass legislation in allowing the operation of driverless cars on the road. Two short years earlier, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab director Sebastian Thrun unveiled that Google had created the world’s first autonomous car.
In the recent decision The Hebrew University of Jerusalem v. General Motors LLC, the US District Court of the Central District of California ruled that Albert Einstein’s publicity rights now belong to the public domain given that more than 50 years have passed since his death in 1955.
Won’t somebody think of the children!? A New York federal court judge will. A copyright infringement lawsuit by multiple authors’ groups – including two Canadian ones – against Google and several universities for their HathiTrust Digital Library book scanning and digital distribution has been dismissed.
DC Comics v Pacific Pictures Corp et al, the recent decision of a Central District of California court to deny termination rights to the heirs of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, may be legally based in American copyright law. However, the case has its roots, loosely speaking, in Canada.
The re-posting of this analysis is part of a collaboration with Ashlee Froese. It appears that fashion's most infamous case has finally come to a close. Both parties seemingly came away from the Appeal decision satisfied: Christian Louboutin's trade-mark registration remained valid and exclusivity was maintained with respect to red soles with contrasting shoes; Yves Saint Laurent was […]
Intellectual property rights are territorial by nature. Copyright holders cannot yet obtain unitary protection throughout the world. Instead, they obtain rights in Australia, Brazil, China, France, South Africa, and the United States. What type of rights they obtain, how strong these rights will be, and whether the rights will be effectively enforced depend largely on […]
With the start of the new season, the IP Intensive program is in full swing. Osgoode students Nancy Situ and Maximilian Paterson are currently at Stanford Law School as Visiting Researchers assigned to CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
The fashion law community has been carefully watching Christian Louboutin and Yves Saint Laurent battle over red-soled shoes. At first, the twitter-verse heralded this decision as a definitive win for Christian Louboutin. However, on closer examination this appears to be more of a win-win (or a lose-lose) situation. Ultimately, co-existence is the name of the […]
The extremely variable pricing of diamonds has made them a historically difficult and unstable commodity to trade. However, recent advents in diamond technology have been patented, and industry insiders such as Martin Rapaport have suggested that diamonds will become akin to gold from an economic standpoint.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in the case Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) and ACLU v. USPTO and Myriad Genetics (Myriad), held in August that isolated genes are a patent-eligible subject matter. The Court of Appeals reaffirmed its prior ruling on the matter, which was recently covered by IP Osgoode.