Who controls the British Crown? Who keeps illegal streaming down? The Federal Court of Canada does! (May the pop-culture references commence.) The Federal Court of Canada made international news by handing down one of the harshest copyright sentences in its history, a fine of over $10M. The defendant is only 23 years old.
It has been nearly twenty years since the Uruguay Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) trade talks that created the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. In the intervening decades, multilateral trade negotiations have stalled and international agreements relating to intellectual property (IP) law have trended towards bi- and plurilateral levels. And, […]
Dubious and likely illegal image scraping is alive and well. And outside of particularly public, harmful cases like Rehtaeh Parsons’ photo ending up on a dating site, few organizations or governments seem to be effectively coordinating to stop the practice.
Abstract: This study problematizes international copyright policy by using a case study that can be said to exist outside of the copyright paradigm. Using works of mas in Trinidad and Tobago as my case study, I examine what a policy with the potential to protect it as a cultural product with commercial value would look […]
The 2013 Speech from the Throne seems like a distant memory. Ongoing allegations and revelations emanating from Canada’s Senate chamber have all but overshadowed the Government’s agenda, which Governor General David Johnston dutifully delivered to Canadians on 16 October 2013. Canadians who are eagerly awaiting the Government’s plans for moving the country forward in a […]
There is a little-known place in the world where you can approach absolutely anyone—a Brazilian federal minister or WIPO legal officer; a policy manager at Google or the world's leading cybersecurity expert; an Indonesian LGBT activist or Pakistani digital rights advocate; or someone at some intersection of civil society, government, business, academia, law, technology, or […]
In common law countries, the term of protection granted by copyright has been steadily growing ever since its advent in the eighteenth century, yet the benefits of these term extensions has been vigorously debated. A new study by Meghan McGarvie and Petra Mosner, however, provides evidence that payment to authors by London publishers significantly increased […]
Mark Twain once said that "facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable." Now, many believe that the London School of Economics applied their statistics a tad too flexibly this fall when its Media Policy Project Series Editors released a brief advocating that the United Kingdom not implement its expected Digital Economy Act 2010Â (DEA).
The re-posting of this analysis is part of a cross-posting collaboration with MediaLaws: Law and Policy of the Media in a Comparative Perspective. The age-old question on the use of free and open source software in the Italian Public Administration (PA) seems to be coming to an end. Last January the Agency for Digital Italy […]
In the time that it takes you to read this paragraph Google will have removed eight sites from its search engine indexes. Sorry, make that forty.