This past March, Toronto hosted the 55th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA). This year’s ISA Annual Convention brought together over 5300 scholars, practitioners, and students to discuss “Geopolitics in an Era of Globalization”. As intellectual property-based industries become increasingly implicated in global economic, social, cultural, and political discussions, copyright issues are becoming more […]
Creating YouTube videos incorporating copyright protected works is a commonplace, often amateur pursuit of today's tech-savvy cultural 'consumers' and no one is making money off of it, right?... Wrong!
When I first read the Supreme Court of Canada's landmark decision in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada concerning the concept of originality in copyright law, I thought something was amiss. According to the Copyright Act, copyright shall subsist in every original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work; however, "original" is not […]
An Ontario Superior Court has rejected a class action settlement between the publisher Thomson Reuters and a collection of Canadian lawyers and law firms, stating that the proposed settlement is not “fair, reasonable, or in the best interests of the Class Members.” The proposed settlement would have seen Thomson Reuters fund a trust for public […]
In a stunning decision recently released by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Google was ordered to remove the now-infamous film, “Innocence of Muslims”, from YouTube. While the ruling challenges traditional understandings of copyright ownership and protected expression under US copyright law, the Court’s unprecedented opinion also has significant implications for […]
The Federal Court granted an order compelling an internet service provider (ISP) to divulge the names and addresses of some 2000 account holders implicated in alleged copyright infringement over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. This type of order is often associated with “copyright trolls” in other jurisdictions. However, in granting the order, Prothonotary Kevin Aalto attached conditions […]
In Part I of this series of blog posts, I discussed a position paper I submitted to the Hong Kong government as part of its public consultation on the treatment of parody under the copyright regime. This post continues from where the previous post left off. It discusses a forthcoming article I contributed to the Symposium on User-Generated Content under Canadian Copyright Law, which […]
The re-posting of this analysis is part of a cross-posting collaboration with MediaLaws: Law and Policy of the Media in a Comparative Perspective.
Marco Bassini is the Managing Editor of MediaLaws, www.medialaws.eu, and a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie LLP’s office in Milan. The re-posting of this analysis is part of a cross-posting collaboration with MediaLaws: Law and Policy of the Media in a Comparative Perspective.
In ten weeks at Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (SOCAN) I learned how to gamble on horses, how to create a shark costume out of an old sweater and some cardboard, the proper amount of food to eat at a Chinese buffet (three plates, including dessert), and to always fill out the Health and […]