Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Normally when a consumer purchases a copyrighted work embodied in a tangible object (e.g., a book or a CD) they are completely free to lend or resell that object without the permission of the rightsholder. In the United States, this is called the doctrine […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. According to a report commissioned by ICANN, the organization that oversees the domain name system, less than one quarter of domain name ownership records are accurate. Recent statements by the FBI and the UK Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) have drawn upon this report […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Joel Tenenbaum was the second person to go to trial after being accused of internet file-sharing. His struggle with the RIAA has won him plenty of supporters as "the average David fighting against the corporate Goliaths." This is just part of a larger social […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Last week, the Federal Court of Australia published a highly anticipated judgment in Roadshow Films v. iiNet. iiNet is an Australian ISP accused of authorizing copyright infringement by creating a service by which it profited from infringement and by failing to take "reasonable measures" […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. MyTVR, a new remote storage digital video recorder (RS-DVR) service has recently launched in Australia. The service allows paying customers to record TV shows and stream them to their PC or mobile phone. It sounds great, but the legality of the service is far […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. A year after the US Second Circuit found that remote storage digital video recorders (RS-DVRs) did not violate copyright, the High Court of Singapore has come to the opposite conclusion. The Court found that operators of commercial RS-DVR services would be liable for authorization […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. If information falls on the tenth page of Google results and nobody reads past page three, does it make a sound? Orin Kerr recently posted a suggestion for increasing your privacy online: change your name to one that already gets lots of results. Odds […]
Billy Barnes is a JD Candidate at the University of Toronto. The Australian government recently rejected a recommendation by the Productivity Commission to repeal the Copyright Act's parallel import restrictions. Parallel import restrictions, which exist in most English-speaking countries including Canada, prevent the importation of copyrighted works without the consent of the local rightsholder. Australia's […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Last Friday, Google filed a revised settlement agreement for the class action law suit regarding its Google Book Search service. The settlement addresses many complaints directed at the original proposed settlement in October 2008. The two most important of these are the handling of […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Did you know that Facebook will 'memorialize' a person's profile after their death? Until recently, not many people did. The feature has existed for a few years now, but it received minimal media attention until a member of the Facebook team posted about it […]