Digital Copyright Canada

Google generates serious revenue ($20 billion+) from its AdWords program and “Keyword Suggestion Tool”. Yahoo! has its equivalent Sponsored Search service, and so does Microsoft through Bing Search Advertising. All of these internet advertising services allow advertisiers to buy “keywords” to appear in online ads within sponsored search results.  Advertisers can buy words, phrases, or even a competitor’s [...]

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 [...]

With a few weeks to go before the Winter Olympics, VANOC’s anxiety about official marks (what you might call “brand-wringing”) continues.  The list of protected terms was expanded in December (curiously, this order managed to pass before Parliament was shut down) to include the mascots like Quatchi, at right, and various other symbols of the [...]

There a few recent updates from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO): Trade-marks: Is Canada finally going to join the Madrid Protocol? CIPO has just a opened a consultation on a Proposal to amend the Trade-marks Act. The proposed amendments focus on  “new business practices and improved international standards”. This may re-ignite the debate about whether Canada should ratify [...]

The court injunction preventing infringing sales of Microsoft Word (see: Microsoft Loses Patent Appeal) went into effect on Monday. While the company says it is complying with the court order, MS has submitted another appeal in the patent infringement case, asking a panel of 11 judges of the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to review [...]

2010. Winter. Games.   As the 2010 Olympics reach a frenzied pitch in Vancouver, the contests on the ice and snow will be matched by brand battles on billboards and posters.  You will recall that in Beijing, the “Brand Police”  (see: Olympics and the Trade-Mark Police) covered up offending trade-marks with duct tape. Not just in Olympic venues, but throughout the [...]

A mobile app is just like any other software application and should be properly licensed to end-users.  Even for free versions, the app developer is not giving it away, but merely making a copy available to the user under certain conditions.  Recent updates to the iTunes Store software have made it possible for app developers to make [...]

Apple launches a cellphone. Nokia releases a laptop. Apple buys an online advertising division and Google moves aggressively into software and hardware. With the release today of Google’s nexus one phone, which positions itself as an iPhone competitor, the ongoing battle for the smartphone market heats up another few degrees.  Nokia and Apple are already locked in patent litigation with [...]

2009 was a fascinating year in the world of intellectual property and internet law. Here are a few issues to watch in 2010: Olympic Marks:  The next few months will focus attention on the uses and abuses of both Olympic marks, as well as the Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act.  Canadian Copyright Reform and Anti-Spam Law: [...]

On Tuesday, Microsoft lost at the U.S. federal court of appeals in a landmark case that will force the software maker to redesign its flagship word-processing program. The US appeal court upheld a $290-million US judgment against Microsoft in the patent battle launched by Canadian company i4i Inc.  The injunction comes into effect in January [...]

Way back in 1998 - almost prehistoric when it comes to technology - a US inventor registered a design patent for “Computer display with an iPhone window” in a prescient move that saw a device with email, telephone, internet services all arranged by handy icons in a rectangular screen called an “iPhone”.  Sound familiar?  Check it [...]