Gospel, Gold Diggers, and Gum Trees: How Sampling Litigation Changes the Tune

Ren Bucholz is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall and is taking the Intellectual Property Theory course. Copyright holders, like musicians, have a knack for riffing on ideas from the past.  Consider the many variations of the copyright infringement lawsuit.  Every year brings more examples of a rights-holder who hears some element of their song, […]

The Evolving Treatment of Digital Locks

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 […]

All Mixed Up: Scrabulous and the Realpolitik of IP

In 2005, two brothers in Kolkata, India launched Scrabulous, an online implementation of the board game Scrabble. With a few thousand regular players, it wasn’t about to replace World of Warcraft in the annals of online gaming. But in 2007, they took the suggestion of a regular player and spent just ten days writing a […]