Virgil Cojocaru is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. ‘The Long Tail’, written by Chris Anderson refers to the alleged effect of online stores such as Netflix appealing to smaller niches. Individually these niches do not yield a large profit, but collectively (hence the long part) they can provide a handsome reward. Some […]
Stuart Freen is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. This past summer I was fortunate enough to work on Artmob, an interdisciplinary project here at York. Headed by Canada Research Chairs Rosemary Coombe and Christopher Innes along with Darren Wershler-Henry, Artmob is basically about building an online, open-source content management system for arts […]
Billy Barnes is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. In a much publicized move, Amazon remotely deleted two books from users' Kindle e-book readers. It causes one to wonder what rights we actually have in our digital possessions in this increasingly connected world. As you quickly learn when you start studying IP law, property […]
Marsha Cadogan is a Ph.D candidate at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Intellectual Property Theory course. Personality interest in Music Copyright - Commentary on Professor David D. Troutt's article "I Own Therefore I Am: Copyright, Personality, and Soul Music in the Digital Commons" (Professor Troutt's article is forthcoming in the Fordham Intellectual Property Journal.) Troutt’s article […]
Abraham Drassinower is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Few propositions are more frequently asserted in contemporary copyright discussion than the proposition that copyright is a balance between authors and users - a balance (as some like to say) between the incentive to create and the imperative to […]
Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. Jack Kirby (1917-1994) is well-known to comic book fans as one of the most influential artists and authors in the history of the industry, particularly noted for his groundbreaking work with Marvel Comics during the 1960s. Kirby had a hand in the […]
Brian Chau is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Where do we draw the line between commercial and non-commercial uses? Is this view the same across content creators and users? A quick background Creative commons licences are designed to help content creators (who own the copyright) communicate to their users which rights they […]
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 […]
Back in November 2008, I wrote about the challenges that Google faced in their Google Books Library Project and their proposed settlement in response. To refresh, the Google Books Library Project is a hugely ambitious initiative to catalogue the millions of books in the collections of several major libraries and include them into Google Book […]
There is an interesting debate going on right now between William Patry and Ben Sheffner at the Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars blog. It centres on the verdicts in two recent high-profile p2p trafficking cases launched by RIAA against regular people (Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum). In Thomas-Rasset's case, a jury awarded damages against […]