BeyoncĂ©âs Lemonade left a sour taste in at least one personâs mouth. Matthew Fulks, a Louisville-based filmmaker and creative director at the WDRB Kentucky news station, is taking the singer to court for copyright infringement. The plaintiff claims that Lemonade, BeyoncĂ©âs trailer for her latest album, copies âvisual and sonic elementsâ from his short-film âPalinoia.â
Intro: âThe Hookâ This summer, an American jury found that âStairway to Heavenâ [hereafter Stairway] rockers Led Zeppelin did not infringe the song âTaurusâ [hereafter Taurus], performed by the band Spirit. The plaintiff, Randy Wolfeâor rather, a trustee for the trust which owns the late Wolfeâs copyrightâwas Spiritâs songwriter, guitarist and vocalist, and the copyright […]
Canadian users of Facebook may be familiar with the process of âtaggingâ photos â adding the names of the people to images â but they may not be familiar with the âTag Suggestionâ feature on Facebook. Tag Suggestions, which automatically scans photos uploaded to the social media site in an attempt to identify for the […]
The once proposed PRINCE Act [the Act] has now been set aside after being rushed through the Minnesota state senate. The Act sought to create a new property right in a personâs persona. Canada and the United States both recognize and protect personality rights through similar common law torts. The US appears to also seek […]
The re-posting of this article is part of a cross-posting agreement with CyberLex. The Spokeo decisionâs requirement that there be a concrete injury in order to ground privacy damages is not just a U.S. issue. Canadian courts have been wrestling for some time with the question of what damages look like in the context of […]
From Lab Bench to Court Bench: The Science, the Law, and the CRISPR Patent Dispute Whenever a new technology has the potential to be ground-breaking and extremely valuable, there are bound to be disputes about invention and ownership. From Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison to the new space race, scientists and inventors are often driven […]
The U.S. Ninth Circuit court held in DC Comics v Towle ("Towle") that Mark Towleâs Batmobile replicas infringed DC Comicsâ copyrights, and that the Batmobile was a "character" deserving of copyright protection.
An overview of what the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement would change in Canadian policy The Government of Canada is inviting Canadians to read and comment on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), along with the governmentâs Summary of the Agreement, which provides an overview of how the TPP would affect Canada. The summary suggests that the largest […]
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (âTPPâ) agreement pages of both the Office of the United States Trade Representative and the White House display an understandable, if not provocative, logo extolling that the trade deal is âMade in Americaâ. For a trade deal whose negotiations spanned the length of President Obamaâs term in office, this is hardly surprising: with the end of […]
As the new Liberal government turns its mind to the application of substantive policies, it will have to decide what to do with the Canadian orphan drug regulatory framework (ODRF) that has been in development. This framework, based in large part on the example of the United States Orphan Drug Act (US ODA), which has […]