Music and Copyright: How the Supreme Court Struck the Right Note in Robinson (Even if its Timing was a Little Off!)

In the recent case of Cinar Corporation v Robinson, the Supreme Court of Canada considered the scope of copyright in a children’s television show. The defendants’ show, Robinson Sucroë, was, frankly, so similar in its essential elements to that developed by plaintiff Claude Robinson that few people, if any, were surprised by the Court’s finding […]

Copyright at the Edge of Artistic Creativity

Part of what makes studying the creative arts from a legal perspective so fascinating is the diversity of forms that art takes, and the ways in which law is sometimes underprepared to deal with issues brought forward through art. A classic instance of this problem is the case of Rick Gibson, a Canadian artist who […]

Copyright: [Skill and/or Talent?] and Judgment

A few weeks ago, while re-reading CCH Canadian Ltd. v Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 SCR 339 [hereafter CCH], I paused on a rather peculiar detail from this well-known Supreme Court decision.  Intrigued, after a brief search, I was surprised to find that no one in Canadian copyright discourse seemed to have expanded […]

A Primer On Measuring Music Copyright Infringement

Guillaume Laroche is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and a Graduate Student Member of IP Osgoode. Prior to entering law, he completed studies in music performance, composition and theory at the University of Alberta, the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, and in England. At the Society for Music Theory’s 2011 […]

Europe Visits Canada: What European Copyright Law Has To Offer

Guillaume Laroche is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Of all the great policy discussions that can be found in Ottawa on any given day, those seen last Friday, October 21, 2011, at IP Osgoode’s conference, “Can Canada Learn Anything From Europe? European Perspectives on Copyright Law in the Information Era” were certainly […]