Intellectual Property, Supreme Court of Canada and Civil Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada provides a laboratory in which to investigate comparative law. A symbol of the hybridization between the civil and the common law, it is composed of justices coming from Quebec and the rest of Canada. No marriage comes without difficulties: in some cases, the Court must construe federal law where the two systems dictate contradictory results. In the absence of uniform rules applicable throughout the country, justices must choose between the two traditions. The authors use intellectual property as an example to look at the treatment of the civil law by the Supreme Court of Canada in copyright law, patent law and trademark law. The authors find that the philosophical underpinnings of civilian approaches to intellectual property find little resonance at the Supreme Court. This is because, on the one hand, the common law sees intellectual property as a utilitarian tool to promote innovation, creation and economic growth. The civil law, on the other hand, seeks to protect the interests and personality of rightholders as an end in itself. Caught in the middle, the Supreme Court has deliberately favoured the common law over the civil law. The authors, respectively trained in both traditions, unravel Supreme Court decisions to identify common and civil law strands. This diversity, mirroring Canada's own mixed system, provides deeper insights in the mixture of common and citil law in Canada. This paper is directed not only to Canadian jurists but also, as integration and harmonization initiatives are developing in Europe, to the international community.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
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".