My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) focuses on the recent Supreme Court of Canada Heinz decision which sheds light into how Canada' s top court regards the importance of privacy. I argue that the decision can be read as an indirect endorsement of the Privacy Commissioner […]
Post Tagged with: "supreme court"
The Supreme Court on Privacy
David Fraser points out that the Supreme Court of Canada has just released a decision, H.J. Heinz v. Attorney General (Canada), that includes a significant amount of privacy analysis. The case involves privacy considerations within the context of Access to Information Act requests. The divided court, which interestingly relies on the recent LaForest report on the potential merger of the Offices of the Information and Privacy Commissioners, says several noteworthy things about privacy and reflects some differences on the court on the merits of judicial intervention on privacy grounds.
CanLII Launches ScanLII
The Canadian Legal Information Institute has announced the first results from an important new project dubbed ScanLII. It appears that ScanLII will attempt to the fill the very large gaps in the freely available Supreme Court jurisprudence online. They’ve scanned 200 decisions dating back to 1976 with more to come.
Supreme Court Nominee Could Have Big Impact on IP
My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) examines new Canadian Supreme Court nominee Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein, whose lengthy record on patent, copyright, and trademark matters suggests that he may very well challenge the status quo at Canada' s highest court. The column uncovers several speeches by Justice Rothstein that reveal a candid judge who is uncomfortable with incorporating policy into the legal decision making process, who is willing to examine intellectual property laws of other jurisdictions, and who recognizes the limits of intellectual property law.
Justice Rothstein, who appears before a House of Commons committee today, has emerged as a prominent jurist on intellectual property cases at the Federal Court of Appeal. His best-known decision is the Harvard Mouse case, which addressed the question of whether higher life forms, in this case the "oncomouse", could be patented. Justice Rothstein ruled that it could, concluding that there was nothing in the definition of "invention" under the Patent Act to preclude such patents.
Justice Rothstein has also presided over leading copyright and trademark cases. He wrote a concurring opinion in Law Society of Upper Canada v. CCH Canadian, a copyright case that focused on the photocopying of legal decisions. He sided with the majority in a high-profile trademark battle between Lego and Montreal-based Mega Blocks.
The Court That Gets It
The Supreme Court of Canada yesterday issued its much-anticipated (by trademarks practitioners anyway) decision in the trademark battle between Mega Blocks and Lego (the case is formally known as kirkbi ag v. ritvik holdings inc.) The unanimous court found for Mega Blocks, ending Lego' s attempts to use trademark law […]