Amanda Carpenter is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has pointed to US polling showing that as much as 45 percent of employers use social networking sites when scrutinizing job candidates. This didn’t surprise me, as I happen to know someone whose full-time job was to conduct online background checks on potential employees.

Indeed, the cited poll found that over one-third of employers have passed over candidates based on what they found online. Reasons may include inappropriate photos, references to alcohol consumption and drug use, and negative comments about former employers. Discrimination, of course, may be less wholesome, as some employers have been known to judge candidates based on the attractiveness of their profile pictures, and—where privacy settings inhibit such snooping—even pose as others in order to be “friended.”

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Posted in Privacy
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Amanda Carpenter is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

The New York Times has recently published an interesting article about academic plagiarism. Within the article, a couple of examples of plagiarism are provided. The first example involves a freshman student who copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page, and did not think he needed to credit this Web site as a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.  The second example involves a student who was reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia without crediting it as a source. This student said that he thought what he had copied from Wikipedia did not need to be credited since it counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

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Posted in Infringement, Internet
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Amanda Carpenter is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

In a recent English case involving the Times Newspapers Ltd (“Times”) and Detective Sergeant Gary Flood (“DS Flood”), the Court of Appeal interpreted the “Reynolds defence” to defamation and also decided that a newspaper publishing allegations on its website after it was communicated to them that no evidence could be found supporting the allegations left it liable for defamation.   

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Posted in defamation
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Amanda Carpenter is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

To help protect authors, the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 provided for inalienable termination rights, rights unique to the United States. An inalienable termination right means that when an author assigns their copyright rights to a publisher, and even if that assignment agreement stipulates that the assignment of rights will last forty years the author will be able to reclaim his or her rights to their creation after 35 years. That is, copyright law steps outside of the freedom of contract realm and terminates the assignment, thus allowing the author to regain the copyright rights, “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary”.

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Posted in Copyright, Ownership
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