Collective mens rea? Or a lack of musical supply…

Thursday, March 20th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Intellectual Property | 1 Comment »

Ben Jones of TorrentFreak published an article a couple of weeks ago discussing the 2008 Digital Entertainment Survey in the U.K., in which it was revealed not only that so-called "piracy" is rampant, even among the generally non-criminal element. ...

Nine Inch Nails in the RIAA’s Coffin

Thursday, March 13th, 2008 Posted in Humanities, Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

According to Prof. Larry Lessig, Nine Inch Nails' latest album has been released under Creative Commons. Kudos to Trent Reznor! http://lessig.org/blog/2008/03/nin_goes_cc.html I tried to comment but Prof. Lessig's blog is giving me some sort of SQL error. Here is my ...

Fair Play and Griefing in Second Life

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 Posted in Intellectual Property, Video Games, Virtual Worlds | No Comments »

Terra Nova has an interesting piece on the issue of fair play in virtual worlds. I think the question is whether "griefing" could be considered infringement to fair play, which implies that fair play exists as a principle, and ...

Michael Geist lauds CRIA; jeers RIAA’s “hassle” policy

Monday, March 10th, 2008 Posted in Intellectual Property | 1 Comment »

The difference between commercial piracy and private copying was clear in the Copyright Act's s.80, it was made clearer by BMG v. John Doe, and now we can see the difference in action. Professor Michael Geist compares the RIAA's ...

Selling your everything: Non-comp clauses, IP, and employment contracts

Saturday, March 8th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Video Games, Virtual Worlds | 4 Comments »

I would like to write, today, about a murky subject I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks. The various forms the germ of this post has assumed over those weeks all stem from a particular type of clause ...

Congratulations, Professor Michael Geist!

Monday, February 25th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

Prof. Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa is the Canada Research Chair in E-Commerce and Internet Law, an advocate for users' rights in the copyfight, and the recipient of an EFF Pioneer Award: Slaw Electronic Frontier Foundation Professor Geist rallied the Canadian ...

Reconstituting the Copyfight Polarization, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Corporation

Monday, February 18th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

I was recently discussing with a colleague on Tazzu the new allies the Copyfight seems to have found: Tazzu Discussion Thread: "The Forces of CopyRightness gain another ally" Ars Technica: The Privacy Commissioner is not a big fan of the ...

Ford gets confused and shoots itself in the foot

Friday, January 18th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Intellectual Property | 4 Comments »

So Ford Motor Company is a little bit confused. They are claiming some form of intellectual property in photographs of specific Ford Mustangs. Not in the abstract image of the iconic car, but in the photographs taken by ...

EULAs aren’t all bad

Monday, January 7th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Virtual Worlds | No Comments »

End-User License Agreements aren't all bad. They are necessary for interration - that incorporation-like thing for virtual worlds that Castronova talks about - in order to set out and delimit the game space. It is when they violate ...

DMCA-Free Canada: a land of opportunity

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) are the fortresses of code, silicon, and/or law that enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM). By not criminalizing (as a per se offense) the circumvention of TPMs, Canada keeps the doors open to innovation. Period. Innovation is not ...