Stuart Freen is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. This past week Mininova.org, one of the largest public file-sharing sites out there, finally shut its doors. After a legal fight with BREIN (the Dutch music and film industry's anti-piracy arm) earlier this year, Mininova has now removed all infringing torrent files and is […]
Ren Bucholz is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Intellectual Property Theory course. Copyright holders, like musicians, have a knack for riffing on ideas from the past. Consider the many variations of the copyright infringement lawsuit. Every year brings more examples of a rights-holder who hears some element of their song, […]
Brandon Evenson is a 2010 JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. He holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Queen’s University. Prior to attending Osgoode, Mr. Evenson consulted for some of the world’s leading technology firms in the area of contract risk and licensing compliance. Last Thursday, IP Osgoode hosted Chris Castle, managing partner […]
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 […]
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 […]
Graham Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, a member of Dalhousie Law School's Law and Technology Institute and the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Technology. He is also an IP Osgoode Research Affiliate. Have you ever wanted to see Metric's […]
42 years after playing the memorable organ solo on "A Whiter Shade of Pale", ex-Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher has finally been awarded a share of the song's royalties. Despite penning the melody from the British band's most popular song, Fisher was never acknowledged as one of the song's authors. Now, in one of the […]
Open core licensing, also known as commercial extensions, is a licensing regime that offers core components for free, but charges licensees for additional premium products. The approach is a twist on the dual licensing approach where the vendor, as copyright holder, makes the source code freely available, but also offers the same code under a […]
Virgin Media and Universal Music Group have taken the plunge into an ISP and digital music collaboration to provide customers in the UK with unlimited access to MP3 downloads and streaming of Universal label artists. Although the exact monthly fee for this service has yet to be determined, Virgin plans to provide the service for […]
Chris Castle is Managing Partner of Christian L. Castle Attorneys, Los Angeles and San Francisco. You've probably heard the expression "the long tail" used by Web 2.0 cognoscenti. Despite the largely uncritical acceptance the idea received a few years ago, research shows that for artists the "long tail" is the "wrong tale". But it may […]