Communications Law
Trade Secret Law
Trade Secrets Hi everyone! Brandon and I were talking about things IP law might not cover. While chatting we started thinking about things like secret recipes or processes, and stumbled upon trade secrets as a branch of IP law. Looking further into it, we realized that this is both an important type of Intellectual Property […]
False Copyright Claims on YouTube
A number of novel uses of copyright were mentioned last lecture. This reminds me of the huge amount of false copyright claims that one of my favourite YouTubers, named ‘TwoSetViolin’ is facing. As a classical music comedy duo, they usually play classical music in the videos and they have already gotten more than 100 copyright […]
AI-created Audio
I was reading an article on an audio copyright festival in Beijing (how fun!!). There was a section about AI-created audio content. While “AI can easily imitate and copy the creative style of others without involving the imitating of specific works, which challenges essential systems and principles of the Copyright Law”, the article presents a […]
Sour Patch Kids vs Stoney Patch: Trademark Issues in Parody Brands
Last week’s lecture discussion on passing off reminded me of the issue on cannabis products resembling candies. I was reminded of its seriousness, especially during Halloween season when children collected trick-or-treat candies, and found this article. The article introduces the trademark lawsuit by the maker of Sour Patch Kids, Mondelëz Canada Inc. (“MCI”), against Stoney […]
Stardust: copyright in biographical films
Ancient Roman philosopher Seneca writing to his friend on the shortness of life once said: “It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it”. Never before had I appreciated this slice of ancient wisdom more than on a cold summer night in 2021 when I decided […]
Pirate Joe’s
I was reminded today of a very interesting (and hilarious) bit of local history and a great example of IP law in action. As some of you know, unfortunately, we don’t have Trader Joe’s up here in Canada. A local man saw this unfilled niche and opened up a store reselling TJ’s merchandise. A hilarious […]
An overview of sampling
Hi everyone! There have been some questions about samples, so I decided to write this piece that touches upon use and history of sampling, and also considers why copyright owners don’t sue more frequently over the use of samples. Defining “samples” Samples are short pieces of recorded music or sounds that can be inserted into […]
EDM Video with Live Sampling
IMG_9742 Hi everyone! Hope you’re all enjoying reading break. I wanted to share this video I took last Friday night at an EDM concert. In the clip, Timmy Trumpet is sampling a song by David Guetta, which is in turn itself sampling a song by Eiffel 65. It reminded me of our discussion last class […]
Using copyrighted images to train AI
This lawsuit was briefly mentioned in last week’s news of the week and has particular relevance to what we’re currently covering in class. Getty images is currently suing Stability AI, an AI based image generator, alleging they copied 12 million images belonging to Getty to train it’s AI model. This case is particularly interesting to […]
ChatGPT creating content for BuzzFeed
Hi everyone! I recently came across an article that discussed how BuzzFeed will be creating some of its content using ChatGPT. The use of AI technology for content creation seems to be in its early stage, and BuzzFeed’s CEO said that the company is currently looking to use it for limited purpose – to generate […]