In an eagerly anticipated decision, the Supreme Court of Canada released its judgment on Canada v. GlaxoSmithKline Inc., 2012 SCC 52 (Glaxo SCC, affirming 2010 FCA 201 [Glaxo FCA]).
Re-examination and invalidity proceedings each play an important role in the patent system, offering different avenues that narrow or invalidate existing patent claims. However, a lack of clarity on how the two provisions co-exist has led to litigation which this editor believes could be avoided through legislative amendments to the American patent regime. Similar issues […]
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 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 […]
Brian Chau is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. A recent case, In Re Construction Equipment Company, came through the US Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit, which highlighted potential conflicts between findings of validity that arise from re-examination on the one hand and an invalidity action on the other. This case appeared to […]
Brian Chau is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Apple commenced legal action in the WIPO against several domain names with obvious similarities to Apple products that host pornography instead of Apple-approved content. The domains in question are iphonecamforce.com, iphonecam4s.com, iphonesex4s.com, iphonexxxforce.com, iphone4s.com and porn4iphones.com, as reported by Domain Name Wire. To succeed, Apple […]
Brian Chau is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Brian J. Love, a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School, conducted an empirical analysis of litigation by various classes of patentees in a randomly selected sample of 1,143 patents issued from May 11, 1993 to May 10, 1994. The draft paper, entitled "An Empirical […]
Brian Chau is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. In Canada and the United States, copyright owners may elect to recover an award of statutory damages for each work infringed instead of actual damages and profits. A wide range of statutory damages is possible and this has led to a series of troubling […]
Brian Chau is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. The Conservative majority government has placed a new copyright reform bill, “An Act to amend the Copyright Act” on the Notice Paper earlier today. This new bill is expected to be introduced tomorrow.
Brian Chau is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. In a recent article, Christopher J. Buccafusco and Christopher Jon Sprigman consider whether IP transactions are subject to “endowment effects”. The endowment effect is a human behavioural phenomenon in which an individual’s perceived value of an object they own is greater than the value prescribed by […]