Ten years ago I landed in Toronto with my wife and an 11 months old son. I left my job as a staff lawyer at the Israeli Antitrust Authority and arrived to Toronto to become a student again at UofT’s Faculty of Law. A couple of days later I had a meeting with Prof. Brian Langille: now my colleague, then the Associate Dean, Graduate Student. The meeting was part of a routine procedure for all incoming graduate students, but nonetheless, it was a sign for a great start. Not that I had never had meetings with professors in my earlier …

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Let it be known that I have very negative attitude towards Ipsos Reid. A couple of days ago my phone office rang.  The speaker presented herself as a poller from Ipsos Reid, interested in conducting a survey about the public attitude towards companies.  I politely declined.  First I said that I was very busy.  She asked me if there was another time when it’d be more convenient to talk to me and I said that I actually wasn’t interested in participating at all. A few hours later the phone rang again, same introduction only asking to speak to one of …

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Paul-Erik Veel and I have (finally) posted our new paper on SSRN.  The paper, downloadable here, is called “Beyond Refusal to Deal: A Cross-Atlantic View of Copyright, Competition and Innovation Policies”.  Here’s the abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that the European Union, through the application of its competition law, has opted to subordinate intellectual property rights in the pursuit of competitive markets to a much greater extent than has the United States. We argue that, at least in the context of copyright protection, this conventional wisdom is false. While European antitrust regulation of IPRs does presently seem much more robust and activist …

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On Tuesday, I submitted my Reply to Access Copyright’s (AC) submission regarding the AUCC Application to compel AC to grant transactional licenses.  In my previous submission I pointed out that while the AUCC correctly diagnosed some of the problems, it asked to Board to prescribe the wrong remedy.  I also explained why the conduct that the AUCC complained about might run afoul the Competition Act.   AC responded on July 8.  Basically, AC’s response boiled down to four themes: “I didn’t do it”: flatly denying any wrongdoing without providing any evidence or theory to refute the evidence-based allegations made against it; …

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