Featured

Blog, Featured

Tagged with , ,

Last year, I wrote the following essay, as part of a collection of essays, “NAFTA and the Knowledge Economy”, published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). The essay discusses what Canada’s approach to intellectual property in the context of the renegotiation of NAFTA should be. Since the issues are back at the table, I thought I’d post it again. You can read it on CIGI’s website, download a pdf version, or simply scroll down.

Blog, Copyright, Featured, Patent, Trademarks

I was invited to participate in a two-day conference in Toronto, organized by the Conference Board of Canada. The conference’s title is Business Innovation Summit 2013: Innovation for the Corporation. I was asked to be on a panel debating the following hypothetical motion: “IP Protection Should Be Strengthened to Stimulate Innovation and Commercialization.” Arguing for the motion were Sheldon Burshtein, a partner at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, and  Mark Fleming, Director, Federal Affairs and Health Policy, Janssen Inc. Canada. Sam Trosow and I were invited to argue against it. And we did. Before our debate began, the organizers distributed clickers and asked the audience to …

“IP Protection Should Be Strengthened to Stimulate Innovation and Commercialization”: Motion Denied Read more →

Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Featured, Stationers

Earlier the previous week the US Department of Justice announced that it reached a settlement with McMillan in the antitrust e-books case, following previous settlements with the other four book publishers (Hachette,  HarperCollins, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster)that it sued less than a year ago. According to the DOJ, the agreements between those publishers and Apple “provided a perfect opportunity to coordinate the Publisher Defendants’ collective action to raise e-book prices.” The DOJ took swift action to prevent anticompetitive practices at a crucial moment in the development of digital publishing to ensure the competitiveness of this rapidly emerging industry.

Blog, Copyright, Featured, Piracy, Stationers

Michael Geist reports today that the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and other business groups want to ensure that their members will be premitted to secretly install spyware on personal computers for a wide range of purposes. Specifically, they demand to be permitted to install, without individuals’ knowledge and consent, computer programs that are installed by or on behalf of a person to prevent, detect, investigate, or terminate activities that the person reasonably believes (i) present a risk or threatens the security, privacy, or unauthorized or fraudulent use, of a computer system, telecommunications facility, or network, or (ii) involves the contravention of any …

The Canadian Star Chamber of Commerce Read more →

Blog, Copyright, Featured

I posted the most recent draft of my new paper on fair dealing on SSRN. The paper recounts the history of fair use and fair dealing and shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the enactment of the Imperial Copyright Act of 1911 – and subsequently the enactment of the Canadian Copyright Act of 1921 – were not designed to cause any major alteration in the common law of fair dealing, and the explicit recognition of five enumerated purposes in the (then) newly-enacted fair dealing provision was not intended to limit the principle of fair dealing exclusively to those five purposes.

Blog, Featured

From June 10 to June 12, 2013, the International Max Planck Research School for Competition and Innovation (http://www.imprs-ci.ip.mpg.de) and the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich (http://www.lawecon.ethz.ch) will jointly organize their Fourth Workshop for Junior Researchers on the Law and Economics of Intellectual Property and Competition Law. OVERVIEW: The workshop will enable a small number of junior researchers from law and from economics to engage in an intensive, rigorous discussion of their own scholarly work. Several senior professors from law and from economics departments in Europe and the United States will provide feedback on the research projects. Keynote …

Call for Papers: Fourth Workshop for Junior Researchers on the Law and Economics of Intellectual Property and Competition Read more →

Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Copyright Collectives, Featured, Stationers

The Australian Copyright Advisory Group Schools (CAG Schools), an organization representing over 9000 schools and Australia’s 3.5 million schools students urges the repeal of the Education Statutory License and relying on a flexible fair use/fair dealing regime in its stead. This position is part of the CAG School’s submission to the Australian Law Reform Commission who is currently reviewing Australia’s copyright laws. In its submission, the CAG Schools highlights several shortcomings of current Australian copyright laws as applied to education. UPDATE (Dec. 10, 2012, at 5:33 pm): Universities Australia make similar points in their ALRC submission. The CAG Schools argues that the …

Australian Educators: Repeal the Education Statutory License, Expand Fair Dealing Read more →

Blog, Copyright, Featured

The U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear today oral arguments in  Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. today. I am particularly excited about that because I am one of the signatories of a law professors’ amicus brief supporting the Petitioner. The question in this case is whether the first-sale doctrine, codified in s. 109  of the US Copyright Act, applies to copies of works made outside the United States. More directly, the question is whether a U.S. copyright holder can prevent the importation of copies lawfully made and first sold abroad. That is, wether the Copyright Act allows copyright owners to …

Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons: Regulatory Arbitrage vs. Market Arbitrage Read more →

Antitrust / Competition Law, Blog, Copyright, Featured, Stationers

The Publishers Weekly reported yesterday that “The Association of American Publishers (on behalf of five named publisher plaintiffs) and Google today announced they have settled their long-running litigation over Google’s library book scanning. According to a statement from the AAP,  Google is said to “acknowledge the rights and interests of copyright-holders,” and U.S. publishers can “choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project.” The PW also reports that “publishers deciding to have their scanned works included in the Google database can opt to receive a digital copy for their …

The New Google-AAP Settlement: Some Questions and Antitrust Speculations Read more →

Blog, Featured, Other

John Degen is a writer whose day job is that of a civil servant employed by the Ontario Arts Council. He frequently launches uninformed ad hominem attacks against anyone who questions Access Copyright. Curiously, these rants are regularly tweeted by Barry Sookman, who ought to know better. Degen’s blog of September 24, 2012 states that “…there comes a point when you just get tired of listening to the shrieking crusaders who want to take away your rights. And then those same crusaders smirkingly portray themselves as Nazis, just before Yom Kippur.” What provoked Degen’s ire was a retweet of mine linking to a recently made video …

When Blogs Cross a Line Read more →