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Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, More Fair Use Before SCOTUS
All eyes were on SCOTUS yesterday as the court heard arguments in the Warhol Prince case. I always look forward to copyright judgments from this court. This is another case on the application of the fair use doctrine or what I endearingly call, the “whatever-you-can-get-away-with doctrine”. Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. v. Goldsmith is a copyright dispute over a photograph of the musician Prince. The issue before the court is to decide whether a work of art is “transformative” when it conveys a different meaning or message from its source material (as the Supreme Court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and other courts of…
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Facebook Hit With $175M Patent Infringement Verdict In Instagram Live
The $175M verdict awarded yesterday by an Austin, TX jury in favor of walkie-talkie company Voxer is the latest in the IP infringement portfolio of Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, this time for using communications technology patented by Voxer in its Facebook Live and Instagram Live features. Voxer first filed its lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In its initial 2020 complaint Voxer alleged that its founder, an army veteran named Tom Katis, began developing communications tech in 2006 after witnessing shortcomings in walkie-talkie technology during his service in Afghanistan. The complaint further laid out that the Voxer app was launched in 2011 and that Facebook representatives got in touch with…
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Galaxy Report On NFT Rights; What About Web3 to Web2 User Generated Content
For some reason, many people still believe that buying an NFT gives them ownership over intellectual property in original works. The Galaxy Report may have found the culprit of this widespread misconception: intentional misrepresentation. As if you didn’t know that buying an mp3 doesn’t give you IP rights to the song encoded in it. You know it full well, because when you post the song on Twitch, someone will come and take it down, even though you bought the game that included the song. Right! Why would an NFT be any different? Because it is more expensive? Since when buying an expensive painting gives you the right to reproduce that…
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$23M Royalties Scam On Youtube – Tip of The Iceberg – Reveals Voluntary Blindness
On Youtube, just about anyone can claim copyright in just about any video for the purpose of monetizing, regardless of whether they own a fragment of a copyright or not. You will only hear about it when someone gets too greedy (in the range of $23M) after claiming over 50,000 copyrights, buying a series of very expensive cars, getting noticed and investigated by the IRS and at least one District Attorney, and attracting over 30 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft. The point is, Youtube knows about it and allows it! Here is how it’s done: If you ever uploaded a video on Youtube, you…
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Metaverse Fashion Week 2022 and What on Earth Are NFT’s?
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Meta v. Meta: Facebook Sued For Trademark Infringement
Earlier this month, we discussed how the name Meta seems like a rather dubious choice for Facebook’s rebrand and how by analogy, precedent informs that the addition of the descriptive term ‘meta‘ has been deemed insufficient to meaningfully distinguish between disputed domain names. Well, it turns out the name Meta was already taken by a VR start-up 12 years prior to FB’s name-change. Consequently, now the first Meta is suing the new Meta for damaging its brand through confusion. Oh the confusion is total! Who will prevail? I already said what I think about Facebook and the myth of it being any kind of leader in the metaverse, so I…
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Protected: New York Court of Appeal: No Habeas Corpus for Happy The Elephant, 2 Judges Dissent
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Privilege in IP Litigation
Section 16.1(1) of the Patent Act was last amended in 2016 to extend privilege to communications made for the purpose of seeking or giving advice with respect to any matter relating to the proection of an invention. In Janssen Inc and Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corp v. Sandoz Canaa Inc., 2021 FC 1265, the Federal Court was asked to interpreted the new section 16.1(1) in order to assess the scope of privilege to be applied to communications with a patent agent. The Federal Court found that the new section excludes a “non-infringement opinion for a product”, finding that communications relating to the protection of an invention do not extend to an…
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Bell v. L3d Distributing, 2021 FC 832, Inducement of Copyright Infringement
Inducement of copyright infringement is a novel cause of action recognized for the first time in Bell Canada v. L3d Distributing where the Federal Court awarded a group of media broadcasters over $25M in statutory damages for the streaming of unauthorized content on defendants pre-programmed set-top boxes. In cases of “whack-a-mole” patterns of infringement where an interlocutory injunction is being ignored by a defendant, like in this case the interlocutory injunction was breached over 175 times and resulted in 10 amendments of the statement of claim, inducement is rather obvious and a very welcome cause of action. It is a known pattern (modus operandi) of Canadian copyright infringers to deliberately…
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Zoombombing Class Action Settles for $85M
In re: Zoom Video Communications Inc Privacy Litigation, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 20-02155. Zoom shared personal information with (Microsoft’s) Linkedin, Google, and Facebook (something Microsoft Teams does every second) resulting in hackers taking control of meeting rooms with racial slurs and porn, a practice known as zoombombing. In reaching the settlement Zoom denied wrongdoing. https://www.reuters.com/technology/zoom-reaches-85-mln-settlement-lawsuit-over-user-privacy-zoombombing-2021-08-01/ This case should serve as a cautionary tale on the consequences of sharing your customers’ privacy information with major platforms. Even if you do so unwittingly, out of ignorance or blind trust in big tech, reckless data sharing attracts hackers and leads to cyber-security breaches that will eventually be blamed on…
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Summary Judgments in Copyright Claims: The War Has Changed
Courts are progressively moving away from their passive caution in matters of patent or copyright infringement where serial infringers are thriving on the slowness and inefficiency of the justice system to keep infringing in the course of proceedings. One way to curtail the modus operandi of Canadian infringers who rarely have a valid defence as they don’t need it until a case is heard on the merits, is to cut short litigation by several years and issue summary judgments against such infringers. (see ViiV Healthcare Company v. Gilead Sciences Canada, Inc., 2021 FCA 122) For example, in
