Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once described the law as nothing more than “prophecies of what the courts will do in fact.” If the practice of law is largely an exercise in fortune-telling, Benjamin Alarie believes that computers are very good at reading tea leaves.
“Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.” Or so Otto Von Bismarck is (incorrectly) said to have said. That may well be true for the general public, but for law students, understanding how laws are made can add a lot to what we know about how they are applied. For […]
Some people just can’t take a joke. Other people have taken jokes, and it has landed them in court. Two recent American copyright cases offer an opportunity to look at the difficulties of protecting comedy routines with copyright.
Even in 2016, it is tempting to treat the Internet as separate from the bricks-and-mortar world. As much as we might like to keep them apart, Augmented Reality apps like Pokémon Go will force the interaction between technology and more traditional areas of law.
The University of Ottawa’s Shirley E. Greenberg Chair for Women and the Legal Profession was created to further the careers of women in the law and to research and advocate for legal reforms that would increase equality for women. At first glance, this might seem a bit off-topic for a blog about Intellectual Property law.
As the New Yorker caption goes, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Update that for 2016: on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a bot. Twitch, a video streaming platform that primarily broadcasts people playing video games, has filed a lawsuit in US District Court against those who sell bot software and services that […]
During the Holocaust, a Polish Catholic single mother, Francizska Halamajowa, secreted 15 Jews away from the Nazis. Two families hid for years in the hay loft of her pigsty, while another family lived under the floor in her kitchen. She also hid a deserter from the German army in her attic. To evade suspicion, she […]
Alec Peters may be the world’s biggest Star Trek fan. Sure, plenty of Trekkies (or Trekkers, if you prefer) have written fan fiction based on the TV series and movies. A number of fans have even created fan videos. But how many of them have raised more than a million dollars to produce a mockumentary […]
From Facebook Groups dedicated to rape jokes to death threats on Twitter, the Internet can seem like a free speech free-for-all. Anyone can say anything, because who is going to stop them? In her presentation, Regulating Speech in Cyberspace, University of Calgary Professor, Dr. Emily Laidlaw answers that question.
March 11, 1876. December 18, 1903. July 21st, 1969. These are the dates that John Weigelt — the National Technology Officer for Microsoft Canada — used to provide scale in his recent IP Osgoode Speaks Series presentation: Adjusting to the Changed Frame of Reference of our Technology Enabled World.