Professor Giuseppina D’Agostino is the Founder and Director of IP Osgoode. As the commentary on Bill C-32 continues to take shape, the one issue that is getting the most attention (and certainly not unlike the other legislative attempts in Bill C-60 and Bill C-61) is again the issue of technological protection measures or what is […]
Steven Zuccarelli is a 2012 JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. [Update: June 11, 2010, 8:41 am - the text below is an updated version of this blog post. Inadvertently an early draft was posted and we have replaced it with a corrected version.] The recently introduced Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-32) has been […]
Professor Carys Craig (Osgoode Hall Law School) has a new paper available on SSRN. Her article is described below. The enactment of anti-circumvention laws in Canada appears imminent and all but inevitable. This article considers the threats posed by technical protection measures and anti-circumvention laws to fair dealing and other lawful uses of protected works, […]
Virgil Cojocaru is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Professor Emir Aly Crowne-Mohammed and Yonatan Rozenszajn argue in their article, DRM Roll Please: Is Digital Rights Management Legislation Unconstitutional in Canada? that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) Provisions in Bill C-61 are ultra vires (Latin for "beyond the powers") of Parliament’s power under […]
Stuart Freen is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Good news for IP lovers who want to get their fix of policy debate at the gym or in the car: The Intellectual Property Colloquium podcast is for you. Based out of UCLA, the monthly downloadable program is hosted by law professor Doug Lichtman […]
On Thursday, December 11, as part of the IP Osgoode Speaks series, Jason J. Kee, the Director of Policy & Legal Affairs for the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC) gave a talk on intellectual property issues in the computer and video gaming industry. The event, held downtown Toronto at Ogilvy Renault’s office, provided lawyers […]
Digital locks[DLs] are ‘virtual fences’ put around digital content.1 An example is a password authorizing the access to an online music store such as iTunes. The government, through legislation, has the responsibility to discourage abuses of DLs. There are at least two types of DLs abuses that harm society. The first involves the actions of users […]
Forget superheroes and cartoon plumbers; the gaming public can now play Charles Darwin. In Spore, the long-awaited new game from the creator of The Sims, players can help a race of beings evolve from single-celled organisms in the primordial ooze to space-faring explorers. The game was epically hyped, and it garnered stellar pre-release reviews. But […]
I recently attended a lecture by professor Bruce Ziff, of the University of Alberta Law School, where he described what he termed as his only original academic idea. He posited that the reason we as a society are so restrictive about property rights is because it is basically impossible to extinguish property rights that have […]
Like many cell phone customers, you might be irritated that your service provider locks you in. Shortly after Apple released its iPhone, hackers developed unlocking software so the popular phone could be used on networks other than AT&T. Since it has not been made official that the iPhone is coming to Canada, many buyers are […]