Author: Jeremy de Beer

How Are We Marked?

 

Students in the course will complete a research project to deepen their understanding of an area of particular interest to them, and to articulate their own views on the issues. Extensive student-professor interaction and feedback on interim deliverables, at students initiative, can ensure high calibre outputs, some of which could be of publishable quality.

 

Digital Locks and Private Copying Levies

The relationship between private copying levies and digital rights management tools is a major challenge in copyright law. Different types of copyright-holders generally prefer different approaches. Individual authors and performers and their representative societies have favourable attitudes towards levies, while major producers and distributors tend to prefer the control digital locks provide. I spoke about […]

How Digital Rights Management Backfired on Sony BMG Music

When Sony BMG snuck restrictive contractual terms and digital rights management technologies onto tens of millions of CDs in 2006, the strategy backfired by alienating consumers as well as artists and leading to class action litigation against the company. My article explains, “How Restrictive Terms and Technologies Backfired on Sony BMG Music.” I argue that […]

Access to Knowledge About Ag-Biotech

At the Access to Knowledge Conference that took place in March 2006 at Yale University in New Haven, USA, I spoke about my research on Canadian ag-biotech patent law, covering parts of my research published in various articles I’ve written about this topic.

“Sucking and Blowing in the Wind”: Contradictions in Ag-Biotech Law & Policy

In January 2006 I delivered an invited lecture called, “Sucking and Blowing in the Wind,” which highlighted contradictions in the way that Canadian law deals with the patent rights and tort liabilities of owners of genetically modified organisms. This lecture discusses an issue I have spoken and written about elsewhere.

Genetic Information Technologies, Property Rights and Tort Liabilities

At the IT.CAN Annual Conference in Montreal in October 2005 I presented my research drawing parallels between digital rights management technologies used in the context of information communications technologies, and genetic use restriction technologies used to control biotechnologies.

How to Compensate Artists for Private Copying

My work on the topic of artist compensation in Canada was presented to the Uniform Law Conference of Canada’s annual meeting in St. John’s, Canada in August 2005. The ideas presented were incorporated into an article on the role of levies in Canada’s digital music marketplace, published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Technology.