The Future of Copyright in a Global Context

This past March, Toronto hosted the 55th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA). This year’s ISA Annual Convention brought together over 5300 scholars, practitioners, and students to discuss “Geopolitics in an Era of Globalization”. As intellectual property-based industries become increasingly implicated in global economic, social, cultural, and political discussions, copyright issues are becoming more […]

The Future of Rights: Intellectual Property, Economic Inequality and the ‘Digital Divide’

A quarter century since he helped to create it, the man widely regarded as the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has renewed calls for a Digital Bill of Rights to help preserve the open and innovative character of his invention and to protect human rights in the so-called digital age.

iCanada: Budget 2014 and the Shape of a Digital Economy Strategy

While many Canadians were justifiably preoccupied with the athletic achievements and disappointments taking place at the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, they may have overlooked the fact that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released his 10th consecutive budget on February 11th, 2014. Budget 2014, entitled The Road to Balance: Creating Jobs and Opportunities, sets out the Government of […]

Can Capitalism and Collaboration Co-exist? Tech Sector Cross-licensing and the Emergence of ‘Cooperative Competition’

In this year’s State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama reaffirmed his Administration’s commitment to addressing economic inequality by fostering the jobs of the future: “We know that the nation that goes all-in on innovation today will own the global economy tomorrow. This is an edge America cannot surrender.” In order to do […]

Going the Way of the Doha? The TPP and Contested Intellectual Property and International Trade Linkages

It has been nearly twenty years since the Uruguay Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) trade talks that created the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. In the intervening decades, multilateral trade negotiations have stalled and international agreements relating to intellectual property (IP) law have trended towards bi- and plurilateral levels. And, […]

Canadians #TalkTV: The Question Surrounding Digital Content Licensing

For the past month the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has been attempting to open its policy and regulation processes to the Canadian public. On October 24, CRTC Chair Jean-Pierre Blais launched A Conversation with Canadians with speeches and discussions at the Université Laval and Ryerson University. As Mr. Blais stated during his presentation at Ryerson, this conversation is designed to […]

The Ever-Present Need for Canada’s ‘Digital Economy Strategy’

The 2013 Speech from the Throne seems like a distant memory. Ongoing allegations and revelations emanating from Canada’s Senate chamber have all but overshadowed the Government’s agenda, which Governor General David Johnston dutifully delivered to Canadians on 16 October 2013. Canadians who are eagerly awaiting the Government’s plans for moving the country forward in a […]

The Incredible, Vanishing Internet (and the DMCA)

In the time that it takes you to read this paragraph Google will have removed eight sites from its search engine indexes. Sorry, make that forty.