Intellectual Property ← Innovation Law Blog

Privacy and Personality in the Digital Era

Mar

2013

If one’s likeness, name, or voice is objectively valuable, the Court may consider one’s property (Athans v Canadian Adventure Camps (1977), 17 OR (2d) 425, 80 DLR (3d) 583 (HC)). Personality can be considered property in about 20 of the American states, for examples New York, California, Tennessee, Indiana, and New Jersey. Several, including Indiana and California, allow the ...

Silicon, Obviously – Not?

Monica Grembowicz

Nov

2012

There’s a new article about the fancy things silicon can do when it replaces carbon in a drug molecule, which makes you wonder: Why isn’t it in a drug*? It seems an obvious substitution: Silicon is right under carbon in the periodic table; It has no “element-specific” toxicity associated with it; It forms four tetrahedral ...

Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons: A Canadian Perspective 1

Kevin P. Siu

Oct

2012

The IP blogosphere is abuzz today over an U.S. Supreme Court hearing, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., a case that has the potential to change the landscape of copyright law, and in particular, the first sale doctrine (otherwise known as the exhaustion doctrine). Ronald Mann from SCOTUSBlog has a good overview of the positions ...

Capitol Records LLC v. ReDigi Inc., the applicability of the first sale doctrine to digital music 3

David Ben Salem

Oct

2012

The start-up ReDigi is judicially battling music giant Capitol Records (EMI) over whether digital music can be resold after it has been lawfully purchased. Launched in October 2011, ReDigi bills itself as an online marketplace for second-hand digital material. When users sign up to its service, they are required to download proprietary software which verifies if ...

Another Patent Infringement Lawsuit: Yahoo vs. Facebook 3

William Wu

Mar

2012

We learned last week that Yahoo has launched a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook. Facebook is alleged to have infringed 10 of the more than a thousand patents Yahoo holds. Here is the list of the patents in question and some details. The 10 patents in question touch on Facebook’s social networking concept, privacy controls, messaging ...

Research Works Act pulled as Elsevier bows to boycott pressure 1

Kevin P. Siu

Feb

2012

For the last month, the academic publishing industry has been the latest battlefield over American copyright law. In December 2011, the US Congress introduced the controversial Research Works Act, which aimed to reverse the National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy of requiring academic research papers funded by its federal grants to be made open access one ...

TIP Conference Day 4: Justice Roger Hughes of the Federal Court

Giselle Chin

Feb

2012

- by Mohamed Hashim Justice Hughes offered a rare glimpse into the world of patent litigation from the judicial perspective. Titled “A View From The Bench” he spoke of the patent system and what it takes to be successful in the world of patent litigation. To start, he quipped that it takes 4 things to succeed: ...

Lawful Access: Reviewing the Bill C-30 Controversy

Jordan Katz

Feb

2012

On February 14th, the government finally re-tabled Bill C-30, long referred to as the ‘lawful access’ legislation and now re-introduced as the “Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act” or the short and controversial title of “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act”. Commentators such as Michael Geist and the University of Toronto’s Lisa Austin have ...

TIP Conference Day 3: Pharmaceutical Patents

Kevin P. Siu

Feb

2012

Today was Day 3 of the TIP Conference, which focused on the topic of Pharmaceutical Patents. As today’s panel moderator, Geoff Mowatt from Dimock Stratton noted, the pharmaceutical space is where all the big patent litigation is happening in Canada right now. $22.3 billion is spent annually by Canadians on prescription drugs, of which 58% ...

TIP Conference Day 2: Non-Practising Entities

Giselle Chin

Feb

2012

- with Rachel Weiner The second day of the TIP Conference focused on the controversial and sexy (for patent law) topic of non-practising entities. The public has a tendency to label non-practising entities as patent trolls, and with that label comes a whole consortium of negative connotations. What is a patent troll? The image that ...