The Elephant Parades the Circus Ring: Grey Goods Versus Copyright -- No Clear Winner...Yet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Copyright monopolies exist to reward the creation and dissemination of works of the literary, artistic, dramatic and musical arts. Copyright attaches to original works and the threshold for originality in Canada is low. Copyright law does not distinguish between artistic or literary elements of product packaging designs and the latest best-selling novel or compact disc.Most products imported from abroad and sold in Canada bear or are accompanied by some kind of copyrightable subject matter. The marketing and distribution of these products are often in the hands of exclusive distributors who, with the foreign maker's assent develop and maintain a market for these products in Canada, often at considerable cost to the distributor.The success of an exclusive distributorship comes at yet another cost-parallel importers find ways to acquire the genuine products abroad and then import and sell these products in Canada, riding the coattails of the exclusive distributor's efforts.Exclusive distributors have long sought an effective remedy in intellectual property law to combat the parallel importation of these A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision, the decision,may provide exclusive distributors with the remedy they have been seeking through the application of the secondary infringement section of the Copyright Act some commentators argue that the application of copyright law principles to create a non-tariff barrier to the trade in genuine products strays far afield from Parliament's original intent in enacting the Copyright Act. They are concerned that such an approach unduly rewards the owners of copyright in such works at the expense of consumers of products. Other commentators argue that exclusive distributors deserve protection from the unfair competition posed by parallel importers who reap the rewards of the exclusive distributors efforts, without any corresponding investment.This article looks at past attempts by exclusive distributors to resort to intellectual property rights to curtail the parallel importation of grey goods. In most cases, intellectual property rights have been ineffective in combating parallel importation. The various Court pronouncements in the series of Kraft decisions reveal a potentially effective remedy to combat parallel importation. However, given the divergence of opinions in the Supreme Court of Canada, the effectiveness of the remedy is still open to question.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".