Where are the Cures? How Patent Gridlock is Blocking the Development of Lifesaving Drugs

Over the last thirty years, investment in the research and development of pharmaceuticals has risen dramatically.  However, the availability of new drugs has not matched the rise in investment.  Instead, Michael Heller has found that the pharmaceutical industry is stuck in a “patent gridlock”[1], where patent owners are blocking inventors from using patented products and […]

Selling the Olympic Spirit to the Highest Bidder

Following late nights out this past August, I could count on getting home, turning on the TV, and catching an Olympic event as it occurred live. My favourite was women’s gymnastics. What I failed to realize at the time, however, was just how meticulously orchestrated the 2008 Beijing Olympic games actually were- and by this […]

Craigslist sex prankster slapped with 75 k lawsuit

In 2006, Jason Fortuny was posting a fake ad on Craigslist. He pretended to be a 27 –year-old female bondage enthusiast.  She (Jason) was looking for a “white or latin man … to give intensive pain and discipline.” Fortuny then collected the replies, 178 in total (145 of them with pictures of men showing them […]

Viacom v. YouTube and Infringement Monitoring in the DMCA: Who Should Have the Burden?

In March 2007 Viacom filed a $1 Billion lawsuit alleging that YouTube “actively engage[s] in, promote[s] and induce[s] [copyright] infringement”. Viacom properties such as South Park, Mean Girls and An Inconvenient Truth have been posted on YouTube.[1] For their part, YouTube has asserted a seemingly ironclad defense: Under Section 202 of the Digital Millennium Copyright […]

The Last Best Place to Trademark?

In recent years, Montana has been flooded by wealthy out-of-staters buying property. [1]  Montana’s historic economy was built on mining, timber, railroads, ranching and energy extraction; today, the economy is regularly injected by the income resident-retirees earn from their investments. Although Montanans are reportedly weary of these out-of-staters transforming their sprawling ranch lands into a retiree’s paradise, […]

USPTO, Courts: No need for inovation in software

Recent decisions by the US courts and Patent and Trademark Office have suggested a move towards the rejection of software patents.[1] This is likely an attempt to resolve the issuance of junk patents, the difficulty in developing software that doesn’t infringe existing patents, and the resulting patent-troll litigation.[2] Irrespective of the current problems, software should […]

Bill C-61 gives with one hand and takes away with the other: Granting time shifting rights but excluding library building

Bill C-61 gives with one hand and takes away with the other: Granting time shifting rights but excluding library building Bell’s personal video recorder (PVR) featuring an external hard drive for archiving recorded television programs premiered when Bill C-61 was debated in Parliament. However, under Bill C-61, archiving recorded programs is illegal.  Time shifting is the […]

'Scrabulous' Gets a Nip-Tuck, Returns as 'Wordscraper'

This summer, following threats of litigation by Hasbro, owner of the Scrabble board game’s copyright, the popular Facebook application Scrabulous was shut down, reworked, and relaunched as Wordscraper, featuring a new layout, design, and scoring system.  In the aftermath of these events, many Facebook users and content creators are confused.  Creators are wondering to what […]

"You’ll never work in this town again!" Retained memory is a trade secret.

Can workplace information retained in a person’s memory constitute a trade secret?  Until recently the answer was no, with courts applying trade secret protection to documents removed from an employer but not to those recreated from a former employee’s memory.  However, the Ohio Supreme Court recently reversed this rule in Al Minor & Assoc., Inc. […]

CIRA’s WHOIS Policy Strikes a Balance

Update July 7, 2009: Jonathan Giraldi's post "CIRA’s WHOIS Policy Strikes a Balance" won the Gowlings LLP Best Blog in IP Law and Technology Prize Fall 2008 in Professor D'Agostino's IP class In a hotly-debated move, Canada’s internet domain registry authority has allowed select groups to request the personal information of domain registrants, after promising […]