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Trade Secret and Breach of Confidence Monetary Claim Stayed by Bankruptcy
The purpose of the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. B-3 (BIA) is to relieve an honest and unfortunate debtor of their debts and liabilities. A discharge from bankruptcy releases the...
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Time for Canadian Leadership on the TRIPS Waiver
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is continuing to hold discussions on a proposal for a waiver of intellectual property rights clauses in its Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights...
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Patent Infringement and Prior Use Rights
In 2018, the Patent Act was amended to expand the scope of the “Prior Use” exception to patent infringement. This exception declares acts not to be an infringement of a patent if a person had done the...
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Who Can Sue for Copyright Infringement?
Case management Judge Trent Horne of the Federal Court recently said “The Copyright Act is, at the risk of understatement, complex.”[1] His case serves to illuminate several key points of that...
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And Now the Driverless Keyboard
We appear to have crossed another great divide in artificial intelligence. It is not just the constant shuffle of driverless cars in my Silicon Valley neighborhood on their endless driving lessons. Nor...
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Indemnity Claims in Federal Court IP Disputes
As a statutory court, the Federal Court only has the jurisdiction provided to it under federal legislation, which includes shared and exclusive jurisdiction in the area of intellectual property. In...
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Retailer Settles CASL Violation Allegations for $200,000
On December 6, 2021, Gap Inc. (Gap) entered into an undertaking under Canada’s Anti Spam Law (CASL) to address allegations that it violated CASL.[1] The undertaking resolves the allegations against Gap...
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Federal Court Provides Guidance on Computer-Implemented Inventions
In a recent decision, the Federal Court was asked to instruct the Canadian patent office on the proper framework for assessing whether inventions are patentable subject matter. The court held that the...
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CASL Computer Program Prohibition Enforcement Benefits From Forensic Evidence
Section 8(1) of Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) prohibits the installation of a computer program on another person’s computer system without express consent. Compliance and Enforcement Decision CRTC...
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The Broader Impact of a Court’s Historic Decision
In overturning Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. the Supreme Court signaled a radical break with the history of the Court, executed in the name of...
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Software and Patent Infringement
Establishing patent infringement can be difficult at the best of times but when the technology alleged to infringe a patent is primarily software, there can be extra hurdles for the patent owner. Some...
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The ‘Making Available’ Right
When Canada signed the WIPO Copyright Treaty in 1997 it required Canada to give copyright owners the exclusive right to make their works available to the public in such a way that members of the public...
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Two Senses of a Right to Research
I have championed ways of increasing the public availability of research and scholarship in these Slaw columns for well over a decade under a variety of names, from open access to the catchy right to...
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Patent Life Cycle
Patent applications are filed, work their way through the patent office, some are granted and after twenty years, they expire. How many patents are actually granted, and now many make it to expiry? I...
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CRTC Targets the Dark Web Using CASL
The “dark web” sounds mysterious and dangerous. The dark web is described as a set of pages on the internet that cannot be indexed by search engines, further can not be viewed in a standard web...
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Learning to Campaign for Copyright Reform
I’ve come to realize that I’m in the early stages of a political campaign to amend copyright for open science. It didn’t start out as a campaign. It began as a series of talks and meetings that...
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Copyright and Generative AI
The use of generative AI to produce text and image has raised many questions about how the law of copyright applies to these systems. There are two important aspects of these tools which implicate...
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Court Enforces a Protective Order
What relief is available to a Court when dealing with the breach of a protective order and breach of the implied undertaking rule? The Federal Court had occasion to consider this question in Molo...
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A Second Marrakesh Miracle?
As someone intent on reforming copyright law, so that it can begin to serve open access to research as well as it currently serves exclusive subscription access to research, one obvious challenge is...
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Anonymizing Postal Codes
The Federal Court recently analyzed what portions of postal codes were personal information and how the data could be made suitably anonymous. Anonymizing data will become increasingly important under...
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