The Court of Appeal for England and Wales has ruled against Lucasfilm in its breach of copyright suit against Andrew Ainsworth, the British designer who produced the Stormtrooper costume for the Star Wars films. (Lucasfilm Limited et al. v. Andrew Ainsworth [2009] EWCA Civ 1328)

Ainsworth had been selling a few Stormtrooper helmets both in the U.S. and in Britain. Lucasfilm claimed that the models for the helmet were copyright works as “sculptures” within the meaning of s.4 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. After a long review of the legislative history and the caselaw, . . . [more]

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case of Ontario, CA, et al. v. Quon, Jeff, et al.. (No, not that Ontario; no, not that CA.) Quon is a police officer who sent hundreds of personal text messages to his girlfriend and others on a device provided by Quon’s employer, which had an informal policy that it wouldn’t inquire into an employee’s use of the device if he or she paid for the cost of extra usage. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals [PDF] ruled that the town’s review of Quon’s messages was an . . . [more]

Well, Dylan said it and December made it true: “accept it that soon, You’ll be drenched to the bone.” Winter finally arrived in Toronto, and in the world of biotech, it did feel like The Times They Are A-Changin’.

It may not have been “a battle outside,” but the Canadian Science Policy Conference did shake some windows and rattle some walls in October; and as of this week, you can check out the audio and video recorded there including Bruce Alberts and Preston Manning.

Dylan’s verse for “writers and critics” said “don’t speak too soon,” but for biotech founders toiling . . . [more]

In case you overlooked it in our selected #slawca retweets from last week, the ABA Techshow 2010 schedule has been released. ABA Techshow will be taking place March 25-27, 2010 in Chicago. View the quick web version of the schedule (session titles only, speakers aren’t listed here) or download the PDF schedule and registration info. Keynote is Ari Kaplan: “The New Big Bang – The Convergence of Technology and Marketing”. Faculty from our Slaw community and the larger Canadian legal industry include:

• Joel Alleyne
• David Bilinsky
• Jean-François DeRico
• Peg Duncan
• Dominic Jaar
• Nils Jensen
• Steven Matthews
• Donna S.M.

The Canadian Government stunned the telecom sector last Friday when it overturned the CRTC’s October 2009 ruling that Globalive Wireless Management Corp. was not Canadian-owned and controlled as required by section 16 of the Telecommunications Act. The variance is effective immediately which means that it’s now clear sailing for Globalive’s entry into the Canadian wireless telecommunications market. . . . [more]

Lawyers Rights Watch Canada (LRWC), an organization that assists lawyers around the world who themselves defend human rights, has published a “Protesters’ Guide to the Law of Civil Disobedience in British Columbia – Olympic Edition” [PDF].

The forty-three-page guide is anything but a sketchy pamphlet for marchers on the front line; it’s a serious, accessible, and well-written handbook. Produced by Leo McGrady originally in 1970 in connection with protests against the Vietnam war, according to a story in the Globe and Mail, and updated a number of times since then, it aims to

. . . inform

“[T]his regrettable result is a necessary consequence of Canada’s commitment to policies of international comity and reciprocity. Any time sovereign immunity is asserted, the inevitable result is that certain domestic parties will be left without legal recourse. This is a policy choice implicit in the Act itself.”

Re Canada Labour Code, [1992] 2 S.C.R. 50 at 91, per La Forest J.

Last week, in a Montreal courtroom, Justice La Forest’s observation was put to the test. For the past three and a half years, Stephan Hashemi, the son of the late Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, has been seeking to . . . [more]

I posted earlier this week (see Privacy, Social Media, Targeting and Marketing: Poked and Pwnd) about recent updates on privacy practices online. Noted was Facebook’s announcement that users would be asked to update their settings to allow better and easier controls for users over their posted information. Facebook users were certainly asked yesterday to update their settings: but I had to blink twice. The update screen gave the choice (i) to keep the user’s old, often customized settings (e.g. restricted to friends only and/or with other customizations for restricted access) or (ii) to allow viewers to access more information . . . [more]

Lawrence Lessig has put out a call to make a donation to support Creative Commons. From his request:

About 8 years ago, a bunch of us started thinking about how we might make the current system of copyright work better. We wanted a voluntary system that would give people a simple way to signal the freedom they wanted their creative work to carry, so their work would say legally what most took the Net to say implicitly — share this. The result was Creative Commons, born December 16, 2002.

None of us imagined then just how quickly the idea

Dominic Jaar has an interesting article in the droit-inc blog (en français) suggesting that a printed document may have less legal impact than the electronic original, because the printout does not reproduce all the information in the original, notably not the metadata. And these days, pretty well all documents start in electronic form, in a word processing program of some sort. Who has a typewriter any more?

This is a particular issue in Quebec because of the terms of the Act to provide a legal framework for information technologies — Loi concernant le cadre juridique des technologies de l’information, . . . [more]

David Weisbrot is stepping down as president of the Australian Law Reform Commission, a position he has held for 10 years.

He was interviewed earlier this week on a radio show of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

“Law Reform Commissions — do we really need them? If governments want to change the law, why can’t they work out what they want by themselves? Do law reform commissions provide governments with camouflage, allowing them to further their political agendas with a veneer of impartiality?”

“After 10 years at the helm of the Australian Law Reform Commission David Weisbrot is stepping down.

I was surprised to read in a recent piece in the Times Online that in the UK lawyers are eligible for jury duty. The author, a senior commercial solicitor, gives an interesting picture of how it feels to be a juror in a criminal trial, complaining that much of the explanation given to jurors about their duty is “pitched at a primary school audience.”

If you imagine a class of seven-year-olds being told about an operating theatre (“here are some big knives, and this is where the man called a ‘surgeon’ cuts the patient, then after that they sew him