Serena Nath is an IPilogue Writer and a 2L JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Every year on January 1, works protected under copyright law enter into the public domain due to their copyright protection expiring. Thus, as a new year approaches, those in the field of copyright look to see which works will […]
New Year's Day is synonymous with new beginnings, and 2016 will be no exception. Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), the manifesto in which Adolf Hitler explains his vision for Germany’s future and his political ideologies, will be falling into the public domain on January 1st, 2016. A French publishing house named Fayard, along with a few German editors, have […]
Most members of the public might be surprised to hear that “Happy Birthday to You” is apparently still subject to copyright protection in the United States, let alone that it is the subject of litigation aptly described by the New York Times as a “lawsuit for the ages.”
What makes a fictional character who they are? Would Darth Vader be Darth Vader without being Luke Skywalker's father? Would Harry Potter be Harry Potter without defeating Voldemort? An American court will be asked to decide just that in Klinger v Conan Doyle Estate.
Nirav Bhatt is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Intellectual Property Theory course. WIPO has been the forefront organization within the United Nations (UN) dedicated to develop a balanced and accessible international Intellectual Property (IP) system. Although it was established in 1967, its history stretches back to one hundred and thirty […]
Jonathan MacKenzie is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Intellectual Property Theory course. Since its first significant formal uses - in the 1896 decision of Singer v. June and the United States' 1909 Copyright Act - the term "public domain" has become a key component of the North American IP legal regime. […]
Abraham Drassinower is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Few propositions are more frequently asserted in contemporary copyright discussion than the proposition that copyright is a balance between authors and users - a balance (as some like to say) between the incentive to create and the imperative to […]