The week-long, student organized TIP Group Conference on Copyright Reform kicked off today with a talk by Roanie Levy of Access Copyright on the subject of Online Learning and Related Exceptions to Infringement for Educational and Research Institutions. Read the rest of this entry »
As outlined in this article, Google has changed the way its search results are ranked, in order to reduce the rankings of “content farms”, websites that simply copy content from other websites. The introduction of this change has begun in the U.S., and will continue around the world. The change has been made in response to complaints by Google users of content farms clogging their search results, a problem which has led a significant number of users to move to other search engines.
The lineup for the TIP Conference next week has been finalized. It looks to be a fascinating series of events, taking place over the consecutive lunch breaks from Monday, February 28th to Thursday, March 4th. The talks will begin at 12:30 and will run until 2:00, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. With the exception of Dr. Michael Geist’s Thursday talk, which will be in the Bennett Lecture Hall, all the talks will take place in FLC. Lunch will be provided on a first come, first served basis.
Starting off the week, the discussion on Monday will centre around Ownership in Academic Work, featuring Margaret Wilkinson of the University of Western Ontario, an award-winning scholar whose distinguished legal career includes experience both as a practitioner and as an academic. Roanie Levy of Access Copyright will also be on the panel, bringing to the table her extensive experience both as an intellectual property lawyer and as General Counsel and Director of Policy and External Affairs for Access Copyright. Pascale Chapdelaine will moderate the discussion. Read the rest of this entry »
As explained in this article by the CBC, a recent study, commissioned by the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association (CGPA), has found that proposed changes to Canada’s drug patent system suggested by the European Union as part of trade negotiations would add billions of dollars per year to Canada’s prescription drug plan.
Republicans from both Congress houses are following through on their vow to fight the newly minted FCC Net Neutrality rules by issuing a joint resolution of disapproval. The resolution, and the repeal efforts, are spearheaded by Republican House members, Greg Walden and Fred Upton, along with Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Kay Bailey Hutchison. Read the rest of this entry »
In anticipation of the upcoming TIP group conference on copyright reform, it seems worthwhile to look at some of the complexities and nuances of copyright and the challenges it poses, situated within the context of the larger debate.
What is ostensibly one of the core issues in copyright can be found in what has been popularly depicted as the need for balance, between creators’ rights on the one hand, and users’ rights on the other. But in certain key ways, this kind of framing is misleading. Read the rest of this entry »
In December, a website purporting to belong to Koch Industries, known for their skepticism of global warming, wrote a fake news release announcing “new environmental commitments. Koch Industries is now suing those responsible for the site, members of a group called Youth for Climate Truth, for damages, alleging hacking, trademark abuse and cybersquatting. The lawyer representing the group claims that, as parody is protected by the First Amendment, the purpose of the suit must be to Read the rest of this entry »
In a little under two weeks from today, the Technology and Intellectual Property group at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law will be hosting a week-long conference on copyright reform. Given that, it seems particularly apropos to review some of our own past coverage on the subject, as well as highlighting some of the important voices in Canadian copyright and copyright reform. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this month, news outlets reported an experiment by Google confirming Google’s suspicions that Microsoft search engine Bing was using Google’s search results without Google’s permission. Google engineered results to search queries in its engine and watched as Bing reproduced the same results providing evidence that Bing was borrowing Google search results.
Microsoft denied Bing was using Google technology explicitly to generate search results; however, Bing does utilize multiple inputs in generating search results which can be influenced by other search engines including Google. This raises issues of how and to what extent a search engine can and should be influenced by other search engines before said behaviour raises flags of improper copying.
MPEG-LA, the patent collective that licenses the popular h.264 video codec, has issued a call for patents that may underlie Google’s competing WebM codec. Google released the codec license-free shortly after acquiring it last year. However, it is widely expected that Google may not have acquired all relevant patent licenses. MPEG-LA says that it hopes to establish a patent pool and license the codec itself.
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