Howard Knopf has a terrific post on how Canada could use IP and IP policy to address concerns with the economy.
Post Tagged with: "Intellectual Property"
Globe on McGill IPR Report
The Globe and Mail reports on a new McGill study that concludes that intellectual property laws may be stifling innovation and that increased patent protection may hamper future innovation.
Nobel Laureates Fear IPR Stifles Innovation
IP Watch reports on a recent speech from two Nobel Prize laureates on how intellectual property protection is closing down access to knowledge.
CIRA Creates Backdoor WHOIS Exceptions for Police and IP Owners
Earlier this year, I wrote glowingly about the new CIRA whois policy, which took effect today and which I described as striking the right balance between access and privacy. The policy was to have provided new privacy protection to individual registrants – hundreds of thousands of Canadians – by removing the public disclosure of their personal contact information (though the information is collected and stored by domain name registrars).
Apparently I spoke too soon. Faced with the prospect of a privacy balance, special interests representing law enforcement and trademark holders quietly pressured CIRA to create a backdoor that will enable these two groups (and these two groups alone) to have special access to registrant information. In the case of law enforcement, police can bring cases to CIRA involving immediate risk to children or the Internet (ie. denial-of-service attacks) and CIRA will hand over registrant information without court oversight. In the case of trademark holders (as well as copyright and patent owners), claims that a domain name infringes their rights will be enough to allow CIRA to again disclose registrant information.
This represents a stunning about-face after years of public consultation on the whois policy.
Chamber of Commerce to Launch IP Coalition on Monday
As I posted last March, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce plans to launch a new IP coalition that will counter the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright with a call for stronger IP protection. The Globe is reporting that the coalition will launch on Monday. The Chamber is also featuring a […]