This week, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg will make a long-awaited appearance on Capitol Hill. With Facebook under new and increased scrutiny in the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) following the Cambridge Analytica data breach, Facebook’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer is set to be grilled by representatives of both the Senate and the […]
Innovation is, once again, a topic of great concern for Canadian policy makers and the commentariat. And for good reason. Yet, at a time when (mainly foreign) companies – notably Alphabet (Google), Apple, Tesla, Amazon, and Facebook – are lauded as being the ‘world’s most innovative’ (for example, see FastCompany and the Boston Consulting Group) […]
TORONTO – The Government of Canada is focussed on making high quality and affordable telecommunications services available to Canadians from coast-to-coast-to-coast. Speaking at the Canadian Telecom Summit[1], Navdeep Bains, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, stated that the Government of Canada intends to address the digital divide in Canada. According to Minister Bains, […]
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (“TPP”) agreement pages of both the Office of the United States Trade Representative and the White House display an understandable, if not provocative, logo extolling that the trade deal is “Made in America”. For a trade deal whose negotiations spanned the length of President Obama’s term in office, this is hardly surprising: with the end of […]
A decade and a half since music industry titans like the rock group Metallica launched legal action to shut down the largest (unauthorized) distributor of recorded content, the ways that fans and audiophiles are able to access music and other cultural resources appear, once again, to be in flux. 2015 has already seen the headline […]
It’s hardly surprising that politicians and members of the press often find themselves at odds with one another, as the two have a long history of conflicting priorities and mandates. Yet the two entities occupy complementary and at times oppositional roles in serving the public good. The recent debate surrounding leaked information about possible copyright […]
Recent research is shining a new light onto the Supreme Court of Canada’s (SCC) decision that is said to have “reconceptualized” fair dealing as an integral part of copyright law in Canada (Craig, p. 449). During a 29 September 2014 lecture in the IPOsgoode Speaks Series, Dr. Emily Hudson, the Career Development Fellow in Intellectual Property Law at the Oxford […]
The culture industries appear to be at a crossroads. Shifting advertising practices as well as audience viewing and consumption habits continue to contribute to new challenges and opportunities for media and entertainment providers throughout the world. With its new “A Space for All of Us” strategy, Canada’s national public broadcaster – the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada […]
It’s often hard to recognize the evolving nature of legal regimes amidst the fast-paced and so-called revolutionary social and technological changes facilitated by digital and networked technologies. Laws, norms, and conventions developed over centuries are being problematized and rethought as new social, technological, and economic realities emerge. Computer software, a technology that’s mainstream adoption is […]
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 […]