Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. Almost five years ago, the Authors Guild launched a class action lawsuit against Google over what was then called the Google Library Project. This led to the controversial 2008 Google Book Settlement, which has been one of the major hot issues in […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. Can someone own facts? According to the US “hot news” doctrine, the answer is – sorta. Under certain circumstances, a news gathering organization can receive “quasi-property” rights in facts against allegedly free-riding competitors. As neither property nor copyright, the rarely used hot […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. The rapid rise of online social networks (can you believe that Facebook only opened itself to the general public in 2006?) has already raised many privacy-related issues. For example, I would suspect that many readers of IPilogue have already heard about stories […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. In 1934, Marion Sinclair wrote a short tune, “The Kookaburra Song”, for a Girl Scouts competition. The tune is a short, 4-bar melody intended to be sung as a round (a round is where different voices sing the same melody but start […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. SciDev.net, a website providing “news, views and information about science, technology and the developing world” recently covered a move by Peru's National Institute of Culture to declare the techniques for farming a variety of giant white maize, paraqay sara in the Quechua […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. The BBC recently reported on a proposed law in France about creating an online “right to forget” (Internet legislation would seem to be a hot issue in France; recent news includes the October 2009 acceptance of the graduated-response “3-strikes” HADOPI 2, and […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. Over the holidays the Supreme Court of Canada released two decisions – Grant v. Torstar Corp and Quan v. Cusson – that have attracted considerable attention in the media. This is natural, since the decisions both directly address the ambit of media […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. People are clearly displaying more and more of their personal lives for all to see on social networking websites such as Facebook. Whatever one feels about the appropriateness of some of this behaviour, it's a fact that isn't likely to go away […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. Utter the words “online copyright infringement” and most people probably think of the mass distribution of popular music on peer-to-peer networks or Hollywood movies being downloaded through bittorrent. A recent brouhaha over the unauthorized use of photographs uploaded to Flickr (a photograph […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. The copyright infringement lawsuit centering around the iconic Obama “Hope” image recently took a strange turn. On one side is the controversial artist Shepard Fairey, who produced the famous poster; on the other is the Associated Press, who claims ownership of the […]