Michael John Long is an LLM candidate advancing to the PhD at Osgoode Hall Law School

In his recent essay, Do Patents Have Gender? , intellectual property scholar Dan L Burk admits upfront that the title question ‘strikes many readers as improbable, even nonsensical.’  However, the posited question aims to introduce just how an intellectual property system, which is designed to grant sets of exclusive rights, can include elements of gender.   As Burk notes, feminist scholarship over the past few decades has illuminated the ways in which gender plays a role in many theories and practices of law; including criminal law, civil rights, family law, employment law, tax law, and so on.

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Posted in IP, Patentability
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Michael John Long is an LLM candidate advancing to the PhD at Osgoode Hall Law School

In a recent blog posted on the IP Osgoode website I considered the ruling in City of Ontario v. Quon; a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the issue of the privacy of employee text messages sent using employer issued equipment.  In the Quon decision, the justices unanimously ruled that the search of the employee’s personal messages on his government owned device did not violate his constitutional rights.  In conversations following the blog I noticed that the topic of discussion often shifted, and rather quickly, from the expectation of privacy directly to the violation of privacy, and all with little regard for the grey area involved, the area of harm.

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Posted in Human Rights Issues, Identity Theft, Privacy
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Michael John Long is an LLM candidate advancing to the PhD at Osgoode Hall Law School

On the morning of July 1^st a common thread rippled throughout my email inbox; the topic related to movie streaming sites, or perhaps better said, a lack thereof.  After a few key strokes I learned that this streaming website deficit was the result of ‘the largest takedown of illegal movie and television websites in a single action by the federal government,’ according to Kevin Suh, executive for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).  Suh, I was learning, was speaking on the joint federal operation aimed to combat movie piracy.

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Posted in Copyright, Digital Downloads, Internet, Internet Sharing, Movies, Technology
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Michael John Long is an LLM candidate advancing to the PhD at Osgoode Hall Law School

A short while ago, while sitting in the living room at the home of my nurse friend, I noticed a brand new smart phone sitting on her couch side table.  I picked it up and began to play with it, only to have it furiously snatched from my hands not thirty seconds later.  I soon found out that the smart phone was given to my friend by the hospital at which she works.  I then found out moments later that the phone was snatched from my (not to be trusted) hands in order to prevent me, even inadvertently, from changing any details set by the hospital.  The conversation quickly turned to a quasi-legal discussion, as we made our way to her patio, pondering over who actually owns the device and whether her private information saved in the phone is protected.  At the same time, little did we know, these questions were being pondered by the United States Supreme Court.

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Posted in Privacy
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