On 19 August 2014, Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante released a draft of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition. This publication is a 1,200 page document that in many parts reads as a treatise on U.S. copyright law. Its size alone speaks to the complexity of identifying and protecting copyright and […]
The “making available” right, as articulated in the WIPO Copyright Treaty art. 8 (and the WPPT arts. 10 and 14), applies to the offering to the public of on-demand access to a work in the form of a stream or of a download. The “umbrella solution” adopted at the 1996 Diplomatic Conference that yielded the […]
“To live is to war with trolls,” said Henrik Ibsen. Well, Apple Inc (“Apple”) has recently reached an impasse in its war against patent holding firm or "patent troll" Lodsys, LLC.
So much for southern hospitality. Celebrated American author Harper Lee finds herself embroiled in a trademark clash for the right to register the title of her own 1961 Pulitzer-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
When trade and intellectual property collide, strange things happen. In a dispute opposing Antigua and Barbuda to the United States at the World Trade Organization (WTO), that organization authorized Antigua and Barbuda to suspend the application of the its obligations under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement).
On November 30, 2012 the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal in the case of Association for Molecular Pathology v Myriad Genetics Inc. In particular, the Court limited its grant of the appeal to the first question posed by the petitioners: “Are human genes patentable?”
Won’t somebody think of the children!? A New York federal court judge will. A copyright infringement lawsuit by multiple authors’ groups – including two Canadian ones – against Google and several universities for their HathiTrust Digital Library book scanning and digital distribution has been dismissed.
DC Comics v Pacific Pictures Corp et al, the recent decision of a Central District of California court to deny termination rights to the heirs of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, may be legally based in American copyright law. However, the case has its roots, loosely speaking, in Canada.
In late March, The United States Supreme Court ordered the U.S Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit to reconsider Myriad Genetics’ existing patent on two genes associated with a high risk of breast and ovarian cancer, in light of the judgement rendered in Mayo Collaborative Services v Prometheus Labs (Prometheus). A unanimous Supreme Court […]
On March 20, 2012, the United States Supreme Court decided Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., 132 S. Ct. 1289 (U.S. 2012). The case was unanimous and emphatically reaffirmed that United States patent law does not allow ownership of "laws of nature." The context was a pair of patents owned by Prometheus which claimed […]