Archive for July, 2016

The Trouble with the TPP’s Copyright Rules

The Trouble with the TPP’s Copyright Rules

For the past two months, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has been publishing an exceptionally important series on the problems with Trans Pacific Partnership. I was pleased to participate in this initiative and yesterday the CCPA posted my contribution. The Trouble with the TPP’s Copyright Rules draws on my earlier Trouble with the TPP series to highlight several of the copyright concerns associated with the agreement, including copyright term extension, the limited applicability of Canada’s notice-and-notice rules, and the expanded criminalization of copyright law.

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July 29, 2016 Comments are Disabled News
google book search notification at Art & Architecture library, Duderstadt Center by Timothy Vollmer (CC BY 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/42Ls8i

Canada’s National Digitization Plan Leaves Virtual Shelves Empty

Imagine going to your local library in search of Canadian books. You wander through the stacks but are surprised to find most shelves barren with the exception of books that are over a hundred years old. This sounds more like an abandoned library than one serving the needs of its patrons, yet it is roughly what a recently released Canadian National Heritage Digitization Strategy envisions.

Led by Library and Archives Canada and endorsed by Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly, the strategy acknowledges that digital technologies make it possible “for memory institutions to provide immediate access to their holdings to an almost limitless audience.”

Yet it stops strangely short of trying to do just that.

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July 26, 2016 8 comments Columns

Why Canada’s National Digitization Plan Falls Short

Appeared in the Toronto Star on July 25, 2016 as Ottawa Should Commit to Digitizing Canadian Heritage Imagine going to your local library in search of Canadian books. You wander through the stacks but are surprised to find most shelves barren with the exception of books that are over a […]

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July 26, 2016 2 comments Columns Archive
Pokémon Go da más dinero a Apple y Pokemon Company que a Nintendo by iphonedigital https://flic.kr/p/K6BMPH (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Pokémon Go Craze Brings New “Augmented Reality” Legal Issues Into Light

Unless you’ve been offline or focused on a distorted national anthem rendition for the past week, you know that Pokémon Go has taken the world by storm with millions of people wandering around searching for virtual Pokémon characters. The game was officially released in Canada on the weekend – it started first in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand – with millions of people already playing it.

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that Pokémon Go provides a first peek at the potential of widespread use of “augmented reality”, which combines real space places such as parks or buildings with virtual characters or objects that appear on a computer or smartphone. In this case, the app uses GPS on smartphones to identify players’ physical location with the goal of collecting and training virtual Pokémon characters located there.

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July 18, 2016 4 comments Columns

It’s All Fun and Games Until We Lose Our Digital Privacy

Appeared in the Toronto Star on July 18, 2016 as It’s All Fun and Games Until We Lose Our Digital Privacy Unless you’ve been offline or focused on a distorted national anthem rendition for the past week, you know that Pokémon Go has taken the world by storm with millions […]

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July 18, 2016 1 comment Columns Archive