Articles 2023

While federal bills generally do not impact the operations of provincially regulated school boards, Bill C-27 will require a higher degree of protection for the personal information of minors. This article outlines some of the considerations for school boards if this Bill becomes law.

A recent decision of the Ontario Divisional Court found that it was unconstitutional for a Catholic school board to require that its student trustees be Catholic.

Following are our summaries of the civil decisions of the Ontario Court of Appeal for the week of April 24, 2023.

Authors of science fiction are sometimes unduly credited with predicting giant leaps in sci-tech, but the joy of reading them remains. Technology fiction came to be regarded as a serious literary sub-genre in the mid-20th century. The advent of the earliest computer, Alan Turing’s “Turing Machine,” and advancements in space exploration largely coincided with the works of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein.

Facial recognition technology has become increasingly popular among businesses for various applications, including security, marketing, and customer service. However, with the widespread adoption of this technology, there are growing concerns over its potential impact on privacy, human rights, and data protection.

In this ongoing series, we will profile each of the members of the OBA IP/ IT Law Section Executive to learn about them in five minutes or less. It’s five minutes or less because we know that a lot of you docket in six-minute increments!

In The Coca-Cola Company v. The Attorney General of Canada, 2023 FC 424, the Coca-Cola Company appealed a decision of the Commissioner of Patents refusing to grant a patent on Canadian Patent No. 2,718,279 on the basis that the claims in the Application were obvious. The Federal Court allowed the appeal in part. It held that the Commissioner erred in its obviousness assessment of one of TCCC’s claims and referred the matter back for redetermination.

In many negotiations, a client's reservation point becomes critical to understanding settlement options. A reservation point is the worst settlement a client will accept in order to avoid the worst alternative to a negotiated agreement. This situation applies to litigation, non-litigious disputes, and business negotiations, with slightly different dynamics in each.

On March 2, 2023, the Federal Court announced a pilot program to create 'Chambers' of judges in the areas of: 1) IP/Competition; 2) maritime and admiralty; and 3) class actions. The notice indicated that the Chief Justice will assign IP, competition, and maritime and admiralty matters to members of the Court who have expertise in those areas, with the stated objective of developing expertise within those silos in the Court.

ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft-backed research lab OpenAI, has occupied the artificial intelligence news stream since its initial launch in December 2022. ChatGPT is a natural language processing generative AI tool that, depending on the model a user can access, can generate text-to-text, or image-to-text, output in a formula which mimics human conversation. The first publicly available tool of its kind, ChatGPT has become one of the fastest-growing consumer applications of all time.