The “making available” right, as articulated in the WIPO Copyright Treaty art. 8 (and the WPPT arts. 10 and 14), applies to the offering to the public of on-demand access to a work in the form of a stream or of a download. The “umbrella solution” adopted at the 1996 Diplomatic Conference that yielded the […]
On July 18, 2014, the world of everyone who streams music or videos containing music – that is, almost everyone who uses the internet – changed a little bit. On that date, the Copyright Board released a decision certifying two tariffs proposed by the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). These […]
Marvel may have to call in The Avengers for help with this one. The comic giant filed papers on July 14th arguing to the U.S. Supreme Court that it should not review the Second Circuit appeal court’s decision in Marvel Characters, Inc. v Kirby. The case concerned whether the estate of legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby […]
For the first time in some twenty years, Canada’s copyright law framework is set for the foreseeable future. Previous attempts (in 2005, 2008, and 2010) to update the country’s copyright legislation for contemporary realities were stalled or aborted due to the problematics of successive minority governments during the mid-2000s. After attaining a parliamentary majority in 2011, the […]
On May 19, Blizzard Entertainment, developer of popular games Diablo 3 and StarCraft II, filed a lawsuit against the developers of the ValiantChaos MapHack, an unauthorized program created for use with the StarCraft II computer game. The online gaming community is split over whether Blizzard is in the right; it seems that one of the only […]
And so the sparring will go another round. On May 19th the United States Supreme Court delivered its decision on Patrella v Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, allowing Paula Petrella to pursue her copyright infringement claim against MGM Studios despite her decision to wait 18 years to file suit. As a result, the Supreme Court has essentially informed the […]
Susan Abramovitch, a partner at Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP and the Head of the firm’s Entertainment Law Practice, will be speaking on two panels this Saturday at Canadian Music Week (CMW) to discuss Canada’s copyright regime and recent developments in Canadian music law and business, and their impact on the Canadian music industry. IP Osgoode had […]
This past March, Toronto hosted the 55th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA). This year’s ISA Annual Convention brought together over 5300 scholars, practitioners, and students to discuss “Geopolitics in an Era of Globalization”. As intellectual property-based industries become increasingly implicated in global economic, social, cultural, and political discussions, copyright issues are becoming more […]
Creating YouTube videos incorporating copyright protected works is a commonplace, often amateur pursuit of today’s tech-savvy cultural ‘consumers’ and no one is making money off of it, right?… Wrong!
When I first read the Supreme Court of Canada’s landmark decision in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada concerning the concept of originality in copyright law, I thought something was amiss. According to the Copyright Act, copyright shall subsist in every original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work; however, “original” is not […]