The pervasiveness of the internet and the rise of online communities present new challenges to copyright law and the notion of fair dealing. For instance - In the aftermath of the stabbing death of 14-year old Stefanie Rengel, all of Toronto’s daily newspapers ran photos of her taken from Facebook. Permission was not granted (or […]
The music industry which includes songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels, believes it is increasingly being shortchanged through technological advances, namely the internet and applicable software, which facilitate the sharing, transferring, dissemination of files and in effect, the pirating of copyrighted music. A novel approach to addressing this concern, spearheaded by chief proponent on behalf […]
I feel quite excited seeing people claiming a big triumph of open source on the decision of the U.S. court ruling on Jacobsen v. Katzer case. However, after a closer examination I felt that this is, as Prof. D’Agostino described Robertson v. Thomson, a case where it is hard to tell winner from loser. The […]
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 […]
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 […]
In a judgment pronounced in early August, which will encourage the open-source movement (Jacobsen v. Katzer, available at http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions/08-1001.pdf), a US Court of Appeals (Federal Circuit) held that a copyright holder can control the future distribution and modification of her work (through, for instance, means such as open-source licenses) even if she has dedicated the […]
What started in early 2007 as just another simmering lawsuit against YouTube boiled over halfway through the summer into a full-blown battle over Internet privacy. While it’s still unclear who’s on which side, it’s fairly obvious that in the end, users are the ones losing out. And for that, we have Google to thank. In […]
Is online music downloading to the new millennium what marijuana was to the 1960s? It seems like nearly everyone is doing it and most have some way of legitimizing it. However, unlike marijuana, Canadian law has been seemingly unclear on the legality of peer-to-peer file sharing – until now. In July of this year, Justice […]
Court and Tribunal decisions, being a work under the direction or control of Her Majesty, fall under the Crown Copyright.[1] Because of the importance in a democratic society to provide unimpeded access to the law, the federal government has officially made an exception to the exclusive copyright possessed by the government for decisions and the […]
July 29, 2008 was a day of mourning for half a million procrastinators around the world. It was the day Scrabulous, a notoriously popular application on Facebook, was removed from the networking site. The withdrawal was prompted by a lawsuit launched by Hasbro, the US copyright owners of Scrabble. Hasbro cited Scrabulous’ developers, Jayant and […]