Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Joel Tenenbaum was the second person to go to trial after being accused of internet file-sharing. His struggle with the RIAA has won him plenty of supporters as "the average David fighting against the corporate Goliaths." This is just part of a larger social […]
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 […]
George Nathanael is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. On January 27 in Washington, D.C., the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus held their annual State of the Net Conference. One panel discussion, entitled “Copyright Strikes: When Has a Pirate Graduated to Internet Exile?”, featured commentary on the concept of graduated response […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Last week, the Federal Court of Australia published a highly anticipated judgment in Roadshow Films v. iiNet. iiNet is an Australian ISP accused of authorizing copyright infringement by creating a service by which it profited from infringement and by failing to take "reasonable measures" […]
Stu Freen is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. As details of Conan O’Brien’s severance deal with NBC leak out, it seems that at least one thing won’t be travelling with Conan to wherever he ends up: His signature characters and comedy bits. NBC has reportedly staked out the IP rights in classic […]
Professor Abraham Drassinower (University of Toronto) has a new paper available on SSRN, “Exceptions Properly So-Called". His paper is described below. The paper sets out to distinguish four kinds of copyright limitations, of which only one can be regarded as a true exception. There are (a) subject matter limitations, (b) scope limitations, (c) miscellaneous exceptions, […]
Brandon Evenson is a 2010 JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Over the last two months, Professor Jim Gibson from the University of Richmond School of Law, has written two articles identifying how Copyright law has for many centuries, and to this day, been used as a tool to censor works.
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. MyTVR, a new remote storage digital video recorder (RS-DVR) service has recently launched in Australia. The service allows paying customers to record TV shows and stream them to their PC or mobile phone. It sounds great, but the legality of the service is far […]
Amanda Carpenter is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. The British case Burrows v. Smith was recently noted by the 1709 copyright blog. In this case, a computer games designer (Stuart Burrows) tries to claim ownership of his own work after having already sold it to a prior employer. Burrows developed an initial […]
Bob Tarantino is a lawyer in the Entertainment Law Group of Heenan Blaikie LLP. He holds graduate degrees in law from Osgoode Hall Law School and the University of Oxford. A suitable name for an entertainment project can be critical to its success and can even enhance the aesthetic effect of the overall work. In […]