Ipilogue

Brandon Evenson is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Given Google’s internet footprint, it would be easy for any web surfer to mistakenly conclude that Google is out to rule the online world. These surfers must be reminded, however, that Google’s true mission is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible […]

Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. Budweiser has begun selling beer cans in the colours of local college football teams in some markets in the US. For example, in parts of Michigan they are selling a maize (pale yellow) and blue "fan can" that matches the colours of Michigan State University. […]

Amanda Carpenter is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School Last Tuesday, the British Columbia Court of Appeal affirmed an important precedent-setting decision of the British Columbia Supreme Court regarding online defamation in Crookes v. Newton., 2009 BCCA 392. In the decision, Justice Saunders and Bauman found against the plaintiff Wayne Crookes who argued […]

George Nathanael is a second-year JD student at Osgoode Hall Law School On a beautiful Friday at the Schulich School of Business, IP Osgoode presented "The Intellectual Property Bargain: Consumer Perspectives in a Global Economy". This one-day conference brought together academics, practicing lawyers, and students to participate in presentations and discussions that aimed to infuse […]

Ashlee Froese is an Osgoode Hall alumnus and currently practices intellectual property at the law firm of Keyser Mason Ball LLP. After a prolonged 8-year battle, the highest court in Malaysia has unanimously confirmed that McDonald's does not have a monopoly over the "MC" prefix in association with all restaurant operations. Lets "Relish" in the […]

Alex Gloor is a JD student at Osgoode Hall Law School. Cleantech is everywhere you look. Hybrid cars. Energy efficient appliances. Geothermal power. There is a global realization that continuing our coal-burning, energy guzzling ways are unsustainable, both because we will exhaust the planet of its resources and because of the uncertain, but certainly disastrous, […]

In a recent post Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, articulated the need for a global patent system calling it "a necessity, if national patent authorities are to overcome the substantial difficulties they face". With respect to patent applications, such difficulties include, increased number of patent application backlogs, longer pendency periods, […]

A recent appeal initiated by the University of Western Australia (UWA) was dismissed by the full Federal Court of Australia, which upheld the decision to place intellectual property rights into the hands of academics, and not the institutions that employ them. The case of University of Western Australia v. Gray involved a particular invention developed […]

Three years ago, Netflix released a database containing the movie preferences of 480,000 users. Last year, Google released information on the viewing habits of millions of YouTube users to Viacom. In both of these and many other similar cases, the data was anonymized first---fields containing personally identifying information were removed. According to a paper by […]

The Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) continues to set forth its proposal of a levy on iPods and other digital audio recording devices. The CPCC is a non-profit agency that collects and distributes the private copying royalties to songwriters, performers, publishers and producers. Since 2000, the CPCC has been collecting levies ranging between 21 and […]