Ariel Katz is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto. Ariel holds the Innovation Chair in Electronic Commerce and is the Director of the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy of the University of Toronto.

Modern trademark scholarship and jurisprudence view trademark law as an institution aimed at improving the amount and quality of information available in the marketplace.  Under this paradigm—known as the search-costs theory of trademarks—trademarks are socially beneficial because they reduce consumer search costs, and as a consequence provide producers with an incentive to maintain their goods and services at defined and persistent qualities.

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Posted in IP, Trademarks
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Ariel Katz is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto. Ariel holds the Innovation Chair in Electronic Commerce and is the Director of the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy of the University of Toronto.

With the Public Copyright Consultations moving full steam ahead, various stake-holders raise proposals for expanding the scope of collective administration of copyright.  This trend is not new.  Over the past two decades or so, collective administration of copyright has been touted as a solution to many of the ills of the copyright system and to many of the legal challenges brought about by the encounter between copyrights and the digital realm. It has been viewed as the magic bullet that bridges the unfortunate trade-off between incentive and access; a mechanism that allows both rewarding creators and unfettered access to works. And indeed, while not at all a new phenomenon – music performing rights have been administered collectively in many countries for most of the 20th century – collective administration has recently proliferated across many other areas of copyright, often with enthusiasm. 

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Posted in Copyright, copyright reform, Innovation, IP
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