Canada’s Federal Court is the go-to forum for intellectual property litigation in Canada. While provincial superior courts have concurrent jurisdiction over infringement proceedings, for several reasons, rights owners often look to the Federal Court to start their proceedings and some recent announcements have reinforced this dominance of the Federal Court for intellectual property matters.

Legislative Background

The Patent Act, Trademarks Act and Copyright Act all include provisions granting concurrent jurisdiction to the Federal Court alongside the provincial superior courts. For example, section 54(1) of the Patent Act states that infringement may be brought in superior courts which is concurrent . . . [more]

Ever accidentally wrote over a template or deleted a document out of a folder that you didn’t want to delete? Ever wanted to check what documents were in a folder on a previous date? Allow me to introduce you to the “Previous Versions” function in Windows Explorer.

The Scenario

You’re working in a folder with a bunch of disclosure documents in it. You’re working on reviewing them and deleting documents that you don’t need at the same time. In doing so, you delete a very important document that you didn’t intend to delete. This document was a PDF that was . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Dans une décision inédite, le tribunal impose une peine globale d’emprisonnement de 8 ans à un accusé ayant notamment produit plus de 86 000 fichiers de pornographie juvénile en utilisant la technologie de l’hypertrucage.

Intitulé : R. c. Larouche, 2023 QCCQ 1853
Juridiction : Cour du Québec, . . . [more]

By Daniel Standing LL.B., Editor, First Reference Inc.

Silence during the accommodation process, strange facts and self-serving evidence in support of a human rights complaint prove to be an unsatisfactory combination of factors for establishing a reasonable prospect of success in proving a complaint at a hearing. Exercising its gatekeeping function in 2023 BCHRT 1, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal dismissed a complaint that is equally odd (factually) and instructive (legally). . . . [more]

The publisher Springer Nature is issuing books with such subtitles as A Machine-Generated Literature Overview, while ChatGPT is being credited as co-author on research papers published in Elsevier journals. Yet Springer Nature’s premier journal, Nature, declared in January, that papers generated by a large language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, will not be accepted for publication: “An attribution of authorship,” states Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature, “carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs.” This soon became part of Nature’s authorship policy. Then on March 16th, the U.S. Copyright Office launched . . . [more]

The U.S. Bar Exam is a high-stakes gamble for would-be lawyers, and a school’s pass rate is a rather high-stakes marker of a law school’s success in creating lawyers. In the next three or four years, the bar exam will be changing in most U.S. jurisdictions, and this creates a number of opportunities for innovation and opportunities for chaos.

Why is the exam changing? The National Conference of Bar Examiners puts it this way: “Set to debut in July 2026, the NextGen bar exam will test a broad range of foundational lawyering skills, utilizing a focused set of clearly identified . . . [more]

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History: Essays in Honour of G. Blaine Baker. Edited by Ian C. Pilarczyk, Angela Fernandez & Brian Young. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. 532 p. Includes illustrations, appendix, bibliography, contributor biographies, and index. ISBN 978-0-2280-1206-1 (hardcover) $140.00; ISBN 978-0-2280-1207-8 (softcover) $39.95; ISBN 978-0-2280-1226-9 . . . [more]

Periodically on Thursdays, we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Fundamental Law for Journalists

Author: Mark Bourrie
Publisher: Irwin Law Inc.
Publication Date: January 1, 2023
ISBN: Print (Paperback): 9781552216699
Page Count: 232 pages
Regular Price: 40.00 $

Excerpt: Introduction and Chapter Six “The Civil Law System”, pg. 111 [Footnotes omitted]

Introduction

I went to law school after working in the media . . . [more]

Preamble

This post is the first of a series considering three major issues under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: the impact of how the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has defined rights; the relationship between rights; and the relationship between guarantees of rights and freedoms and section 1 of the Charter.

I focus the discussion of these issues through the lens of section 3, which guarantees the right to vote and to be eligible to sit in the legislature. Following the exploration of the SCC jurisprudence relating to each of the three issues in relation to . . . [more]

“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. … [The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. …”

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”