I’d been unaware of the new web-based publication, Law in Firm which was released last week by the Village-Justice portal, and an article by Pierre Breese on the protection of scents by copyright, spring from a January appellate court decision involving Oreal and Bellure. Perfumes are creative works, and their authors are entitled to protectionLest you think that scents are trivial Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Research Foundation in Chicago claims that women’s bowling scores can be increased 27% by the smell of jasmine..

This follows an earlier Dutch decision in Lancome v. KecofaLancôme . . . [more]

The digital revolution has hit academia with equal, if not more, force than it has elsewhere, however no heads have rolled with this revolution. I'll leave it to you to decide if that is a good thing.....

Given that this week’s theme is ‘Copyright’, I went back to a recent article I had read in CIO Insight, in January, by Larry Downes, Associate Dean of the UC-Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems and the author of Unleashing the Killer App and The Strategy Machine.

In the article titled “Why Johnny Can’t Stop Sharing Files”, Larry postulates that: “Copyright is effectively dead, despite the entertainment industry having won the Grokster case—or maybe even, in part, because it did. The consequences of ignoring the that change are dire.”

He makes several key points, . . . [more]

A couple of days ago, I came across a note by Tim O’Reilly concerning the Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI). O’Reilly described it as a “copyright hack.” It seems this initiative was started by Timo Hannay, who has also blogged about it on the website of his employer, Nature magazine. The initiative itself is an attempt to respond positively to requests from indexers and data-miners for full-text versions of articles, but without at the same time making human-readable versions of the articles readily available free to non-subscribers. OTMI, an XML format, consists of “word vectors” plus “snippets” which amount, more . . . [more]

To lighten the tone of this week’s serious theme, I give you Justice Peter Smith’s trial reasons in the Da Vinci Code copyright case, aka Baigant and Leigh v. Random House Group Limited.

Just to add to the spicy controversy that seems to follow this popular (but only slightly entertaining and definitely non-literary) book, blogger Ashby Jones (WSJ) posits that the judge imbedded his own code into his judgment. Here’s part of his post for your own entertainment:

He just couldn’t resist, could he? Justice Peter Smith, the judge who presided over the recent “Da Vinci Code” copyright infringement

. . . [more]

Thanks to the Service de recherche documentaire in Boucherville for a post that I missed last year about a feature on the Advanced Google Research page that could be very handy.

There is a box marked Usage Rights, which permits you to search for content that is
* free to use, share or modify, even commercially
* free to use, share or modify,
* free to use or share, even commercially
* free to use or share
* not filtered by licence

So if a page is liberated from traditional content restrictions by having a Creative Commons licence, you can . . . [more]

Today is Secretaries Day (or Administrative Professionals Day, as its now known), but it’s also World Intellectual Property Day.

None of the site is going to set the world on fire.

It Starts with an Idea. There is a video clip.

. . . [more]

Today is World Intellectual Property Day.

Just in time for our Copyright Week, a who’s who of Canadian Music announced yesterday the formation of the Canadian Music Creators Coalition.

They are a strong force:

Barenaked Ladies,
Avril Lavigne,
Sarah McLachlan,
Chantal Kreviazuk,
Sum 41,
Stars,
Raine Maida (Our Lady Peace),
Dave Bidini (Rheostatics),
Billy Talent,
John K. Samson (Weakerthans),
Broken Social Scene,
Sloan,
Andrew Cash
Bob Wiseman (Co-founder Blue Rodeo)

What is interesting from a copyright perspective is that they are articulating an artist-based, . . . [more]

The recent issue of the University of Ottawa Law and Technology Journal has two articles on copyright by Canadian scholars: “The Purpose of Copyright Law in Canada,” by Ottawa’s Daniel Gervais, and “The Evolution of Originality in Canadian Copyright Law: Authorship, Reward and the Public Interest” by my colleague at Osgoode, Carys Craig. Both articles are available online in PDF format. The abstracts follow:

Gervais:
In three recent cases, the Supreme Court of Canada provided several pieces of the Canadian copyright policy puzzle. We now know that the economic purpose of copyright law is instrumentalist in

. . . [more]

I just happened upon this fun, quick interview from last year with David Dodd, editor of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics (Free Press: October, 2005) , chair–at the time–of the California Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, and director of the San Rafael Public Library. The interview was conducted by law librarian Mary Minow from California, and was posted to collaborative blog LibraryLaw Blog.

Greatful Dead were known for allowing their devoted followers to tape their concerts. Minow asks the big question, whether the same ethic of sharing followed when Dodd went to publish Dead lyrics in hard . . . [more]

There’s an article in today’s New York Times, in the Business Section (page C3) which reveals that Xerox profits have taken a downward turn and that its share price has fallen. Given all of the concentration these days on the ‘high-tech’ end of copyright, as well as the news-making cases of alleged plagiarism that have seen authors in court (and there’s yet another case, also in today’s Times, involving the author of the improbably named “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life” (page A14), its interesting to reflect on the story about Xerox and the . . . [more]

Having glanced through a number of the Theme Week articles, I haven’t yet found the practical advice I’m longing for – how can I (a lawyer who should know the law) make sure I don’t go astray when posting to SLAW?

Let me give some simple examples. I decide I want to include a link to an article I’ve recently read on another website. Is it clear that I can link to an “embedded” page rather than just to the first level page? What if I read the article on one of those new “aggregation” pages (I forget the technical . . . [more]