Digital Copyright Canada

A popular Chinese night market in a suburb of Vancouver became the arena for an intellectual property infringement case involving trade-marks and copyright.  In a recent Federal Court decision (Target Event Production Ltd. v. Cheung and Lions Communications Inc., 2010 FC 27), Target, the original operator of the Richmond night market, sued a rival event operator for [...]

In late 2009, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) announced plans to implement internationalized country-code top-level domain names (ccTLDs) using non-Latin characters. See our previous post: Internationalized Domain Names. Four ccTLD requests are moving along the process and are now ready for the final step in the process, the application for string delegation. The [...]

Does a US judge have jurisdiction over a website operated in Canada?  The answer is found in a recent US court decision involving a Canadian website operator  (Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. v. Fung ).  In that case, the Motion Pictures Association of America sued Gary Fung, operator of IsoHunt (a popular BitTorrent site). Mr. Fung’s web sites [...]

A game developer incorporates martial arts moves into a new video game. Is the choreography of those moves protectable by copyright?   The answer is, apparently, yes.  The 1997 decision in Ahn v. Midway Manufacturing Co., 965 F. Supp. 1134 (N.D. Ill. 1997) decided that under US law, certain martial arts routines fell within the subject matter of copyright.  In [...]

Copyright protects a range of creative works - photographs, images, software, books and music, to name a few.  And copyright law is considered to be “territorial” - this means that Canadian copyright law deals with protection and enforcement within Canada.  So what happens when works are published online, or transferred across borders?  Do the traditional [...]

Calling all small business owners. Remember that nagging feeling that you should get a handle on your brands and trade-marks? Here’s a local cautionary tale that illustrates why trade-marks are critical for small business. A popular chain of Calgary eateries has been trading under the name NELLIE’S for years.  Last month, the 5-restaurant chain was cited [...]

Even Google can’t win them all.  In a recent domain name arbitration decision, Google Inc. v 207 Media, a small Canadian company has prevailed against a challenge by almighty Google Inc.  Google objected to the registration of the domain name GROOVLE.COM, claiming that it was too close to Google’s own famous brand name.  In a domain name arbitration, [...]

The Apple rumour mill - which usually spins at an alarming rate even on a slow day - has been at risk of popping a gasket over the past few months with speculation over Apple’s latest product release: a tablet-like device which is expected to do to the handheld tablet category what the iPod did [...]

In the 1990s, researchers at the University of Saskatchewan developed a transgenic variety of flax known as CDC Triffid, which was genetically designed to be herbicide-resistant. The crop received regulatory approval in the mid-1990s, but was never adopted by Canadian farmers for commercial use, because of fears that its use would close export markets such as the [...]

Clean technologies continue to be a significant source of investment capital in 2010. Provincial governments in Canada are looking for ways to attract and retain both the investment dollars as well as the technical and business expertise that flows from those investments.  The Alberta government is accepting applications in the field of bio-energy infrastructure development in connection with [...]