Interesting international post where the Swedish court found that the Jaguar sports car attracts copyright protection as a work of applied art:   https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f4dce82d-f61b-4dfb-ae5a-4fe2e281ac3d    

The BC city of Vernon is handing over the copyright of the name Ogopogo to Syilx Okanagan First Nation, after holding onto the name since 1950: https://www.castanet.net/news/Vernon/328953/City-of-Vernon-hands-over-copyright-to-name-Ogopogo-to-Syilx-Okanagan-Nation  

An interesting article about how NFT’s are taking hold of the music industry, and a way to assert their power over copyright control:   https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/nfts-are-reshaping-artists-ip-rights

For all you sports fans: I was just reading about this interesting trademark issue concerning NCAA basketball. In essence, the fact that “March Madness” branding does not appear anywhere in relation to the women’s basketball version of the event is raising some eyebrows. I thought this was a clear example of the broader social impact […]

Hi everyone, our trademarks class got me thinking about this EU ruling on Amazon from last year. The issue started when a cosmetics company requested that Amazon hand over some knock-off goods. Amazon complied in part, but also refused to reveal the identity of a seller who was listing the goods. The cosmetics company sued […]

A small addition to our recent conversations regarding information-aggregators like Google and Facebook: about two thirds of Google searches last year (and likely more) resulted in the user leaving without clicking through to any of the displayed sites, leaving a majority of traffic and ad revenue with Google. This is up substantially from approximately 50% […]

Hi everyone, a new type of crypto-token made massive waves on the internet last week (or the parts of the net that I look at anyways). You might have read this news of a collage of digital art that sold for USD 69,000,000. The transaction was a major victory for digital-artists and blockchain enthusiasts.  The […]

I came across an interesting copyright issue from 2015 that I wanted to share with you all! SpaceX won the first private spaceflight contract to resupply the International Space Station. Up until this point, NASA (a government agency) has run all missions themselves. So, images taken from space have generally been in the public domain […]

  Hi class, Haya and I made a podcast for our final project on Wiseau Studio, LLC et al. v. Harper et al., 2020 ONSC 2504  about the documentary Room Full of Spoons. This documentary is about Tommy Wiseau and his movie the Room.  The podcast discusses the claim brought by Wiseau against the documentarists for […]

Slides and video below… Jon

Hi everyone, Coming from a public health background, I am very interested in the interaction between the international IP law system and issues around equitable access to medicines. My presentation is on this topic, in the context of COVID-19 vaccines. It is a brief overview of compulsory licensing, voluntary licensing and patent pooling, the TRIPS […]

Hi folks, I came across this article while doing some research/thinking about copyright. Of course, this is an American company and content is thus subject not only to different laws but a view of copyright that differs from our own in a number of significant ways. That said, a few things immediately came to mind […]

Hi everyone, https://www.gamespot.com/articles/twitch-adds-tools-to-help-streamers-deal-with-copyright-strikes/1100-6488958/ Currently, Twitch’s policy is that if a streamer gets enough copyright strikes, they will be permanently banned. Recently, Twitch has implemented new tools that streamers can use to address copyright claims made against their streams and clips, which will hopefully help them avoid being banned without warning. One tool will notify streamers […]

Hi all, I have been doing some research for another class on the online sale of counterfeit goods and thought summarizing some of it could be of interest/relevant to our IP class: The sale of counterfeit goods has exploded with the growth of e-commerce. According to a 2020 report published by the US Department of […]