The IPilogue is IP Osgoode’s online journal of IP Law and Technology. It publishes analysis and commentary on current pressing intellectual property, technology, privacy and related legal issues. The IPilogue features curated contributions from students, scholars, and experts within the Osgoode community, from our network of affiliated researchers and partners, as well as from professionals and scholars in disciplines outside of law.
Editor in Chief: Prof. Carys Craig (ccraig@osgoode.yorku.ca)
Submission inquiries: iposgoode@osgoode.yorku.ca
In re Bilski, the courts must re-interpret 35 U.S.C. § 101, which states that a process can be patented. In State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group, the court decided that business methods were patentable as long as the process produced a “useful, concrete, and tangible result” [1]. In re Comiskey, the courts put an […]
American Airlines (AA) dropped the trademark lawsuit against Google in July 2008. Google maintains it did not violate trademark law. Still, the conditions of the settlement remain undisclosed. The Texas Business and Commerce Code (the case was filed in Texas) defines a trademark as a “word, name, symbol, device, slogan, or any combination” of 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 […]
For years, if you registered a .ca domain, anyone could see your name, address and email in online “whois” databases. In 2008, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) restricted access to this information. Internet law guru Michael Geist hailed early drafts of the CIRA’s new whois policy as “a model for domain name registries around […]
Last May in Brandon, Manitoba, police charged a high-school student with criminal personation after he set up a Facebook profile in his teacher’s name. The charge was laid on the conviction that the profile “contained enough information to cause some disadvantage to the teacher”. Under the Criminal Code it is well established that impersonation alone […]
Our society has become increasingly accustomed to concepts of sharing through the use of the internet. Whether it is sharing photos on facebook or music on limewire we are in an age of rapid-fire sharing. A group of scientists, many of whom are in the Boston area, have extended the sharing concept to the field […]
What probably started as a silly prank could turn into criminal charges of personation against a high school student from Brandon, Manitoba, who set up a phony Facebook profile in his teacher's name that included the teacher's photo and biographical details.1 Although in the end, these criminal charges will probably be nothing more than a […]
The academic scientific community conventionally shares research results, ideas and expertise. Not surprisingly, the commoditization of peer reviewed journal articles seems antiquated with cost and accessibility issues when compared with online posting, web-enabled databases, free online journals and guides as knowledge dissemination tools. In the Aug 25, 2008 edition of The Tech, these practices are […]
As a result of the recent proliferation of social networking sites, a debate has emerged over the media’s ability to use photos added to user profiles, in the absence of express permission granted by the owner. Exacerbating this issue was a recent incident where all four of Toronto’s daily newspapers published articles regarding the murder […]
Digital locks[DLs] are ‘virtual fences’ put around digital content.1 An example is a password authorizing the access to an online music store such as iTunes. The government, through legislation, has the responsibility to discourage abuses of DLs. There are at least two types of DLs abuses that harm society. The first involves the actions of users […]