I had the opportunity to speak with Owen Byrd, the Chief Evangelist and General Counsel for the Legal Analytics company Lex Machina. Based in Menlo Park, California, Lex Machina is one of the many legal technology startup companies that has recently sprouted in the Silicon Valley area. As a leader in the intersection of legal […]
This fall semester I had the honour of attending CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics as part of Osgoode's Intellectual Property Law and Technology Intensive Program. CodeX’s broad mission is to design technologies for a better legal system. Taking this mission in earnest I set out to develop Econo.Mine, a legal analytics platform meant to […]
American IP scholar Mark Lemley aptly characterized the dynamic relationship between IP and competition law as a swinging pendulum, in which antitrust enforcement of IP has cycled from under-protection to over-protection since the enactment of the Sherman Act in 1890. The United States Supreme Court’s recent affirmation of antitrust scrutiny in patent litigation indicated that […]
On 19 August 2014, Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante released a draft of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition. This publication is a 1,200 page document that in many parts reads as a treatise on U.S. copyright law. Its size alone speaks to the complexity of identifying and protecting copyright and […]
Under the Patent Act, an invention must be useful to be patentable. While in Canada the inventor does not need to describe the utility of the invention in the patent, where the patent makes a promise of utility, utility is measured against that promise. If the inventor does not make an explicit promise of a […]
As discussed in Allison McLean’s “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes coming to the Trade-marks Act” June 5, 2014 post, significant changes to the Canadian Trade-marks Act were introduced in Bill C-31, the 2014 budget bill. While the most controversial aspect of the trade-mark provisions of Bill C-31 is the removal of the need to claim or declare use in […]
Bill C-31, the Economic Action Plan 2014 Act No. 1, which will legislate into law the federal government’s recent budget, includes amendments to a number of statutes. Of particular interest are the amendments to the Trade-marks Act (“TMA”). The changes would reverse what has been the fundamental basis of Canadian trade-mark law for over 150 […]
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 […]
Happy World IP Day! Wow, how many times have you said something like that before? World Intellectual Property Day? Yes, IP has come a long way. Since 2000, member states (currently 187 member states) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) designated April 26 (even when it falls on a Saturday like this year) as World […]
The contemporary global order for the promotion of innovation exaggerates the role of intellectual property (IP) as a closed proprietary model of knowledge production and protection. Partly as a boomerang effect of that order and/or partly as a coincidence of the phenomenal rise in the information and communication technologies, there has been increased gravitation toward […]