The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) remains one of the bodies responsible for compliance with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

On April 4, 2023, Canadian police services participated in an internationally coordinated enforcement action against the Genesis Market that traded in stolen credentials and account access. The Genesis Market had over 1.5 million bots and over 2,000,000 identities when it was shut down. It was one of the largest criminal facilitators at the time.

Canadian police worked closely with law enforcement authorities in 17 countries in this coordinated effort. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation led the international operation . . . [more]

As a faculty member of Simon Fraser University, I recently participated in a SFU Faculty Association vote on a motion “calling upon SFU to divest from Israeli commercial interests, suspend partnerships with Israeli universities, and offer concrete support for Palestinian faculty and students.” Such motions have been common across universities around the world during the “situation in Gaza,” as the motion calls it. The inordinate loss of life and suffering of the Israel-Hamas War has led to campus disruptions that have not been seen since the Vietnam War roiled campuses more than half-a century ago (during my student days at . . . [more]

Much concern was expressed on whether a technological protection measure could be used despite the fair dealing user’s right to effectively lock up a work forever.

Some parts if the answer to this issue have been found by the Federal Court in 1395804 Ontario Ltd. (Blacklock’s Reporter) v. Canada (Attorney General), 2024 FC 829.

This case came to the Court by an unusual procedure. The day before the plaintiff, Blacklock’s Reporter, dismissed its claim of copyright infringement against Parks Canada, Parks Canada filed an application for summary judgment and a counterclaim. After the Court established that the counterclaim could . . . [more]

What happens when an intellectual property enforcement proceeding takes too long? Most IP cases in Canada take place in the Federal Court where the rules around dismissals for delay are different than in the provincial superior courts.

In the Ontario Superior Court, after a pandemic hiatus, the court is resuming administrative dismissals of civil cases that have not been set down for trial in a timely manner. As noted in the most recent , “Administrative dismissals under the court rules are intended to promote the timely resolution of legal disputes, discourage delays, and increase efficiencies in the court system.”

For . . . [more]

“This is the largest theft in the United States, period.” Such is the judgment of author and scriptwriter Justine Bateman who has complained to the US Copyright Office that the AI industry has scraped her work, much as it has everything else, having exhausted Wikipedia and Reddit it is moving on YouTube transcripts and Google docs. This is what it takes to assemble the trillions of words needed to expand the training of ever-more-powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). As a result, Bateman’s complaint has become a common charge. Authors (notably Sarah Silverman and John Grisham), publishers (Universal Music . . . [more]

In R. v. Spencer^[1] the Supreme Court of Canada held that a reasonable expectation of privacy attaches to subscriber information — the name, address, and contact information — associated with an individual Internet Protocol (IP) address. In R. v. Bykovets^[2], the majority found that reasonable expectation of privacy extends to the numbers which make up an Internet protocol address even though those numbers might be changed at random by an Internet service provider.

The Facts

The Calgary City Police were investigating fraud in online liquor sales and came across a payment processor who processed the suspect transactions. . . . [more]

A recent decision of the Federal Court endorsing the position of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office is a warning to patent practitioners on communication practices with their clients. In determining whether there had been sufficient ‘due care’, it found that more was needed than sending email reminders where no responses had been received from the client.

In Taillefer v. Canada (Attorney General), 2024 FC 259, the Federal Court considered the ‘due care’ provisions of the Patent Act for the first since they are implemented in 2019. These provisions allow an applicant to reinstate a patent or patent application . . . [more]

Last year a disheartening record was set for research integrity in scholarly publishing. In 2023, over 10,000 research articles were stamped “retracted” reducing them to ghost research. The previous year the number was short of 6,000, itself a retraction record. Clearly something is amiss in the quiet halls of academe.

When a paper is marked retracted, or rather RETRACTED, on page after page, the journal’s editors and publishers have determined that it has a problem well beyond “correction” or “update.” Corrections, for example, will be issued for a number of Claudine Gay’s articles, as the former Harvard president adds . . . [more]

The Federal Court of Appeal had the opportunity to examine the implied license to use a patented article upon its unrestricted sale in Pharmascience Inc. v. Janssen Inc., 2024 FCA 10.

The issue arose since Pharmascience’s proposed paliperidone palmitate for the treatment of schizophrenia and related disorders did not offer the 75 mg-eq. dosage form which would be available from the Patentee Janssen. Janssen brought action under subsection 6(1) of the Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations^[1]. In that action, the respondents, Janssen sought a declaration that Pharmascience would infringe Canadian Patent No. 2,655,3.

Pharmascience defence was that . . . [more]

Were you ever scolded as a child for playing too many video games? Did your parents tell you that your Game Boy was rotting your brain or that you would never make any money playing Donkey Kong? Or (perish the thought) have you ever been the parent doling out such lectures? Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but these common reprises about video games—particularly about their earning potential—might be outdated by a decade or so. In fact, in the creator economy, video game content creators are among the highest paid. As far back as 2014, . . . [more]

Some recent court decisions have focused more attention on double patenting in Canada. Double patenting occurs when someone obtains two patents for the same (“co-terminus”) or similar (“obvious-type”) inventions. If challenged, granted patent claims can be found invalid if they are found to be double patenting over another patent owned by the applicant.

The Supreme Court of Canada has cautioned that, “If a subsequent patent issues with identical claims, there is an improper extension of the monopoly.” Many of the decisions on double patenting, including this statement from the Supreme Court arise from disputes over “old Act” patents where the . . . [more]

Dear Tri-Agency,

I was delighted to see your announcement last summer that the Tri-Agency, representing Canada’s major research funders (CHIR, NSERC, SSHRC), have decided to review your Open Access Policy on Publications. Your continuing efforts to increase the public’s ability to consult research and scholarship through this policy are admirable. Having seen your invitation for public input on the review process, I wanted to make a small contribution, as a professor of education who started a Public Knowledge Project 25 years ago to support public access to research, and as a school teacher before that . . . [more]