Going the Way of the Doha? The TPP and Contested Intellectual Property and International Trade Linkages

It has been nearly twenty years since the Uruguay Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) trade talks that created the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. In the intervening decades, multilateral trade negotiations have stalled and international agreements relating to intellectual property (IP) law have trended towards bi- and plurilateral levels. And, […]

Dating Sites Scrape Internet for Women’s Photos, Including Those of Deceased

Dubious and likely illegal image scraping is alive and well. And outside of particularly public, harmful cases like Rehtaeh Parsons’ photo ending up on a dating site, few organizations or governments seem to be effectively coordinating to stop the practice.

Copyright Economy: Protecting ‘Works of Mas’ in Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract: This study problematizes international copyright policy by using a case study that can be said to exist outside of the copyright paradigm. Using works of mas in Trinidad and Tobago as my case study, I examine what a policy with the potential to protect it as a cultural product with commercial value would look […]

The Ever-Present Need for Canada’s ‘Digital Economy Strategy’

The 2013 Speech from the Throne seems like a distant memory. Ongoing allegations and revelations emanating from Canada’s Senate chamber have all but overshadowed the Government’s agenda, which Governor General David Johnston dutifully delivered to Canadians on 16 October 2013. Canadians who are eagerly awaiting the Government’s plans for moving the country forward in a […]

When the Internet Has a Party, Everyone's Invited: IP Law Issues at the Internet Governance Forum 2013

There is a little-known place in the world where you can approach absolutely anyone—a Brazilian federal minister or WIPO legal officer; a policy manager at Google or the world's leading cybersecurity expert; an Indonesian LGBT activist or Pakistani digital rights advocate; or someone at some intersection of civil society, government, business, academia, law, technology, or […]

Pride and Percentages: Copyright Term Limits and Payments to Authors in the Romantic Period

In common law countries, the term of protection granted by copyright has been steadily growing ever since its advent in the eighteenth century, yet the benefits of these term extensions has been vigorously debated. A new study by Meghan McGarvie and Petra Mosner, however, provides evidence that payment to authors by London publishers significantly increased […]

Caught in the Stat: LSE Receives Criticism for its Report on Copyright in the Music Industry

Mark Twain once said that "facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable." Now, many believe that the London School of Economics applied their statistics a tad too flexibly this fall when its Media Policy Project Series Editors released a brief advocating that the United Kingdom not implement its expected Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA).

Free software and comparative evaluation in the Italian Public Administration

The re-posting of this analysis is part of a cross-posting collaboration with MediaLaws: Law and Policy of the Media in a Comparative Perspective. The age-old question on the use of free and open source software in the Italian Public Administration (PA) seems to be coming to an end. Last January the Agency for Digital Italy […]

The Incredible, Vanishing Internet (and the DMCA)

In the time that it takes you to read this paragraph Google will have removed eight sites from its search engine indexes. Sorry, make that forty.

International Aspects of the New User-Generated Content Exception in the Copyright Act

On October 10, Osgoode Hall Law School hosted a symposium on User Generated Content under Canadian Copyright Law. The final panel of the day featured IP Osgoode Advisory Board member Barry Sookman and Prof. Joost Blom, who each gave a talk on the broader international context of the UGC exception created by recent amendments to […]