Amanda Branch is a J.D. Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, and is taking the Patent Law course. Clashes between large companies are hardly uncommon, particularly when the salient issue concerns valuable intellectual property. Recently, Nokia has filed a lawsuit in the US against Apple claiming 10 alleged patent infringements involving wireless data, speed coding, security […]
Beer companies are notorious for their litigious ways and this summer has seen a continuation in the legal drama. In May 2009, beer giant Labatt Brewing Co. Ltd. launched a lawsuit against the Waterloo-based Brick Brewing Co. Ltd., regarding the similarity of the Brava and Red Baron bottles. Labatt, who acquired Brava in 2007 when […]
This summer I had the opportunity to travel to Munich, Germany where I attended summer courses in Copyright and Patent law. I attended this program though the George Washington University Law School and the courses were held at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law. What I learned in the classroom […]
Thanks to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, it is now clear that "hotel" is a generic word. Hotels.com attempted to register the mark for the services of "providing information for others about temporary lodging; travel agency services, namely, making reservations and bookings for temporary lodging for others by means of telephone […]
The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in the United Kingdom holds the most extensive collection of portraits in the world. Over the past five years, the gallery has been working on its £1 million project of digitising its entire collection for viewing online. In addition to the low resolution images of the complete works, the NPG […]
Google AdWords is Google's advertising product which offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, as well as placement targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. AdWords was Google's main source of revenue in 2008, bringing in approximately $21 billion dollars. With PPC advertisements, advertisers can purchase a specific word or term that will trigger their ad so […]
Fashion is everywhere you look. In the US, the fashion industry's annual sales are higher than those of books, movies and music combined. Everyone wears clothes, whether for necessity, the desire to follow current trends, or for any reason in between. Fashion can be an indication of an individual's social status, and also reflects cultural […]
For nearly two decades, Rob Reger and his company Cosmic Debris have spent millions of dollars developing the fictional character "Emily the Strange" as a gothic rebel who finds nothing more boring than copying everyone else. Over the years, Emily has evolved from a skateboard design to a media empire which includes clothing lines, comic […]
This is the issue currently being considered in the US Congress through an attempt to introduce the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (Act). The Act was initially presented in 2006, but at that time the bill was criticized because the broad wording attempted to stop any design that was "substantially similar" to the original, which would […]
On May 4th, the Ontario Bar Association presented "Intellectual Property Issues in a Non-IP Context". This conference brought together professionals from several practice areas, such as criminal law, insurance law and employment law. The focus of the conference was to draw attention to the variety of IP issues that exist within many areas of the […]