The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Recent Canadian Bankruptcy Legislation Amendments and Their Impact on Intellectual Property Licensing

Lorraine Fleck is a Toronto, Canada lawyer and trade-mark agent who practices advertising and marketing, information technology, intellectual property and packaging and labeling law at Hoffer Adler LLP. The Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BIA) and Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) were recently amended. One of the amendments provides IP licensees with more certainty regarding the […]

Old Issues but New Tricks: China uses the UNESCO Cultural Diversity Convention in a WTO dispute

Nicole Aylwin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Communication and Culture Graduate Programme at York University. This past December the World Trade Organization appellate body ruled against China in a dispute with the United States. The US initiated the dispute in 2007 to address three concerns: 1) China was prohibiting foreign businesses from importing publications, […]

Does The Status And Character Of The Litigant Or Litigant-Related Participant Influence Judicial Decision Making And Therefore The Result?

Munyonzwe Hamalengwa is a Ph.D candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. There are millions of words that have been written both by conservative and progressive judges, lawyers, scholars, political scientists, social scientists, historians and journalists on various judicial philosophies and interpretative doctrines, but the influence of the status of the litigant in influencing judicial decision […]

Top Intellectual Property and Technology Stories of 2009

2009 was a significant year for developments in the area of intellectual property and technology.  We have put together a brief list of noteworthy news, events and cases that we have covered this past year.  Many of these items received top mainstream news coverage and were closely watched by the Canadian public.  We are also […]

Are seeds really computer chips?

Denis Borges Barbosa is a Lawyer in Rio de Janeiro, and Intellectual Property Law Professor at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Marcus Lessa (Institute of Economics, UFRJ, Brazil) is a Partner at Denis Borges Barbosa Advogados Law Firm, Rio de Janeiro. The comparison may – or may not – seem strange, but may […]

Poverty in the developing world: Should TRIPs really be repealed?

Tamsin Thomas is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and is taking the Intellectual Property Theory course. In his article, “Some Realism about Indigenism”, Professor Michael Davis argues that TRIPs “is the biggest disaster faced by the Third World since the end of the territorial-based colonial era.” In the context of protecting traditional knowledge, he […]

Manchester Manifesto questions ‘Ownership of Science’: A Renaissance or Fantasy?

Nirav Bhatt is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. In what could be seen as a strange or rather surprising move, a distinguished group of academicians, the majority of which are based at the University of Manchester, have issued something called the Manchester Manifesto. The Manifesto Group brings together international experts from relevant disciplines […]

(In)justice in Intellectual Property

Michael John Long is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. He introduces his current thesis research below. ‘That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate.  Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public […]

Feminism and Intellectual Property Law

Munyonzwe Hamalengwa is a Ph.D candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and is taking the Intellectual Property Theory course. Feminism along with marxist, critical legal studies and critical race theories have mounted serious challenges to the inherited western legal tradition that has claimed that law is neutral and objective even though law, from time immemorial […]

The Inequitable Commons

Michael John Long is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Intellectual Property Theory course. The Romance of the Public Domain, as Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder see it, is the presumption that the public domain is a landscape where everyone has equal access to reap the riches found therein.  This ‘romance […]