When hearing the word BBM, most people reach instinctively for their BlackBerry, and its instant messaging service, BlackBerry Messenger. However, there is also a company called BBM Canada, formerly known as the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement, which provides impartial ratings data and analysis to Canadian broadcasters and advertisers. BBM Canada sued Research in Motion (“RIM”), […]

On May 31, the Copyright Board of Canada certified a new tariff on the use of recorded music played at events such as weddings, karaoke, and conventions. The tariff will be paid to collective Re:Sound, which represents the rights of artists and music labels.

While North American IP enthusiasts had likely been pre-occupied with the controversy surrounding the stalled American anti-internet piracy bills known as SOPA and PIPA (covered by IP Osgoode here), Europe has been struggling to deal with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Even though it was designed to be an international framework for improved intellectual property […]

When Judy Mikovits had a ‘keystone’ scientific discovery widely discredited, resulting in the loss of her job, it is unlikely that she considered the state of the intellectual property laws governing the work that she performed for her former employer, the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI). However, in November 2011, following the initiation of civil action […]

In what seems to be a never-ending war on piracy, the Royal Navy has been seemingly substituted for an army of lawyers, and skirmishes on the seas traded for exchanges in a courtroom.  In a decision that mirrors an international effort to limit access to the peer-to-peer file sharing website known as “The Pirate Bay” […]

At the Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development -- which followed by forty years the Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and by twenty years the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development -- the negotiators sought to “reinvigorate political will and raise the level of commitment by […]