Digital Copyright Canada

  ipblog.ca will be taking a break over the summer. We’ll be back in the Fall to pick up developments such as: Canadian Copyright Reform (with Parliament breaking for the summer, there will be no further Parliamentary debate on Bill C-32 until September); The US Supreme Court’s decision in the Bilski case (relating to patentability of business methods and software); Changes to the [...]

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office has released a draft version of Chapter 16 of the Manual of Patent Office Practice (MOPOP), relating to “Computer-Implemented Inventions”. The chapter is open for public review and comments between June 16, 2010 and August 19, 2010 and is available through the MOPOP Updates web page. The current revision process provides [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an interesting article on Apple’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement under the (strange) heading “All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple“ which is garbled from both a grammatical and legal perspective.  The Developer Agreement has some zingers in it, to be sure, but it certainly doesn’t claim any ownership over developers’ [...]

The iP3 Forum in Toronto on June 21, 2010 provides an arena to discuss the potential of Apple’s Touch Platform. A business track provides analysis and insights on how to leverage the Platform’s market potential. The technical stream gets into the details of designing and app development. I will be speaking on the subject of [...]

  The Canadian government has introduced the next version of its long-awaited and much-debated copyright reform bill (Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act). Here are a few interesting highlights: Format & Time Shifting: (Sections 29.22 and 29.23) The new law would allow consumers to “format shift” music from commercial CDs to hard-drives, iPods or other devices. It would also [...]

The government has  introduced proposed amendments to the Personal Information Protection & Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The changes to the federal law are wide-ranging and will have a significant impact on privacy law here in Canada. Here are a few highlights from a business perspective of the proposed changes in Bill C-29, and once it passes into law, we’ll provide [...]

The trade-mark Moto Mirror is registered in Canada for use with truck and automobile mirrors. However, the owner of the mark did not actually manufacture the mirrors. In a series of licensing agreements, the owner of the mark authorized other companies to make and sell the mirrors under the Moto Mirror brand.  This is common enough, and is permitted under [...]

When can an internet user remain anonymous?  It depends…. As an update to our recent post about Mosher v. Coast Publishing Ltd., 2010 NSSC 153 (where the identity of anonymous comment-writers was ordered to be disclosed), the recent decision in Warman v. Wilkins-Fournier, [2010] ONSC 2126 (S.C.J.), took an opposite view.  The recent Wilkins-Fournier decision was an appeal of an [...]

Can you get a trade-mark for .doc, .pdf or other file extensions?  The makers of AutoCAD software are pursuing trade-mark protection over the file extension .dwg (referring to “drawing”), which is the file format for the AutoCAD software product. In the US case Autodesk, Inc. v. Dassault Systemes Solidworks Corp., 2009 WL 5218009 (N.D. Cal. December 31, [...]

Today, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) announced that it is developing a protocol to expedite the examination of patent applications related to “green technology”. Proposed amendments to the Patent Rules would be published for comment in the Fall of 2010, meaning that the fast-track program would not likely take effect until late 2010 or early 2011.  When [...]

Patent enforcement and defence strategy often involves a coordinated approach, including patent infringement litigation, patent reexamination before the USPTO, and complaints filed with the International Trade Commission, a U.S. trade panel that can ban importation of infringing goods.   The i4i suit against Microsoft provides a good case-study. In its long-running patent infringement dispute against Microsoft, the [...]

  A number of participants have requested a copy of my slides from the iP3 Forum on Monday, and I have posted a copy here: (2 MB PDF File) The Forum provided an excellent survey of expertise and talent in the growing Canadian developer community.  For more: #ip3forum.

Planning on outsourcing your company’s email to Gmail? Or maybe you’re outsourcing your data storage to a server in the US? Recent changes to Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) stipulate that organizations must notify people when they will be transferring personal information to a service provider outside of Canada. Take the example of the University of [...]

Industrial design is often overlooked while its flashier cousins - patents, copyright and trade-marks - hog the spotlight.  In both Canada (which uses the term industrial design) and the US (which refers to a design patent), this category of intellectual property only provides protection for ornamental and not functional aspects of the design of the [...]

You may have seen our recent post on the subject of Apple’s robust trade-secret protection program. Apple grabbed headlines again when a prototype iPhone made its way into the hands of a blogger at Gizmodo, who promptly posted a review of it. It didn’t take long for Apple to flex its trade-secret enforcement tools.  The [...]

What does an international treaty have to do with ripping songs to your iPod?  You may not have heard much about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), but this international treaty may have significant impacts on the domestic copyright reform process in Canada. ACTA is an international round of trade negotiations that addresses counterfeiting, which in turn deals [...]

If someone engages in online defamation, online copyright infringement or any number of other illegal acts on the internet, the first question is who is actually committing the act in question? One of the main issues facing litigants in Canada is the identity of anonymous actors who are shielded by mysterious usernames, aliases or cryptic email addresses.  In [...]

    This is not an update on intellectual property law, but hey, it’s worth mentioning: Brownlee LLP has been ranked by Canadian Lawyer Magazine as one of the Top 10 law firms in Western Canada. Calgary - 07:00 MST

Do you have a patent in the US or are you a licensee of a US patent? Are your products marked correctly? Canadian patent owners should review patent marking requirements in the US, in light of the recent Forest Group decision (Forest Group, Inc. v. Bon Tool Co., 590 F.3d 1295 (Fed. Cir. 2009)).  This decision has reinterpreted [...]

Regardless of what you are distributing - shrink-wrapped CDs, online applications or smartphone apps - software licensing takes on an added layer of complexity when open source software issues are part of the mix.  The law in the US has been clarified thanks to the Jacobsen v. Katzer case, which was finally dismissed last month after the parties reached [...]