Rex Shoyama is a Legal Product Developer at Thomson Reuters and an MI candidate in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. He was IP Osgoode’s Assistant Director from 2008 to 2010. The following is an excerpt from a forthcoming book review in the Intellectual Property Journal.

The Statute of Anne is often referred to in debates about copyright law and policy to suggest that copyright must be fundamentally rethought because society and technology have changed significantly since the days of the printing press.  What is not nearly as common is a collection of commentary which discusses the Statute of Anne within its broader historical context, extracting lessons that are fruitful for modern copyright policy and reform.

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Posted in Copyright, Feature Post
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Rex Shoyama is a Visiting Professor and the Assistant Director of IP Osgoode.

The general presumption in the Web 2.0 world is that a greater level of sharing and interoperability is a better thing.  However, the method in which this sharing is attained should not be ignored as it can have significant legal ramifications.  Rushing to tear down the “walled gardens” between social networks without careful thought to product development can present great stumbling blocks later. 

For example, Power.com is a site that allows its users to interconnect easily and manage all of its social networks (e.g. Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, etc.) from one place.  The service allows users to keep all of its different social network accounts synchronized.  For example, if you use Power.com to update your profile on Facebook, your Myspace account will automatically be updated.  Power.com also allows content and messages to be easily moved from one network to another.

Unfortunately, the way in which Power.com provided this service has upset Facebook, resulting in a recent lawsuit.  At the heart of the dispute was the fact that Power.com was soliciting (and storing) Facebook users’ login information and passwords in order to provide its aggregation services.

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Posted in General, Privacy, Technology
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