At the dawn of the internet, user privacy was not a concern. The internet consisted of a few bulletin boards, chat groups and static web pages. Most of the public was not using the internet, very little personal information was being exchanged, and it was seldom attached to a real person's identity. From those early […]
The New Zealand government has taken a novel approach to try to fix what seems to be a nagging problem for governments in today’s connected world: peer-to-peer file-sharing. On Oct. 3, Associate Commerce Minister Judith Tizard announced that recent copyright amendments will come into force, including a provision (92A) that requires internet service providers to […]
Social networking has taken on a new dimension at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It has been over a year since the USPTO, in collaboration with New York Law School, initiated the Peer-to-Patent Pilot, a venture designed to bring the benefits of peer review to the patent application process. If the decision […]
A recent tainted milk disaster in China has killed at least three infants and made thousands of others sick. Several countries have banned or recalled Chinese dairy products in response. Economic and health experts are still trying to measure the impact of the melamine contamination. But with allegations of cover-ups and corruption, this catastrophe raises […]
Under Canadian patent law, the scope of patentable subject matter is still expanding. But under U.S. patent law, “anything under the sun made by man” is patentable. This has come to include patents for computer software. Software patents raise a debate over which algorithms are novel, and which are non-obvious. Some algorithms may arguably have […]
Open Access, Competition, and Spectrum Auctions This past week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US announced the winners of their 700Mhz spectrum auction, with Verizon and AT&T being the big winners. In bidding 19.6 billion dollars in the process, the winners secured rights to broadcast on a very desirable swath of radio frequency […]
I recently attended a lecture by professor Bruce Ziff, of the University of Alberta Law School, where he described what he termed as his only original academic idea. He posited that the reason we as a society are so restrictive about property rights is because it is basically impossible to extinguish property rights that have […]
Advertising has always been, or has tried to be, “targeted” at potential and existing customers. The entire purpose of advertising has, and continues to be, to communicate the virtues of a product or services to consumers in the marketplace in an effort to turn potential consumers into actual customers. In the past, this type of […]
Mashup culture continues to expand and proliferate, especially in the online word. Many audience members are no longer content merely to consume media, but actively comment on it, interact with it and reshape it. The explosion of repurposed copyrighted material that appears online challenges old notions of the fair use doctrine, and suggests the need […]
With much fanfare last Monday, Amazon.com released their wireless e-book reader that uses e-ink technology and allows users to purchase books wirelessly over Sprint's cellular network in the United States. Though the product lacks the immaculate design of some other consumer electronics (read: the iPhone), it nevertheless hit the spot for many as the product […]