how long does it take to do an estate settlement in Canada?

My father just passed away and had everything settled in his will as far as I know but I was wondering what is the timeline is the settling of an estate? I understand about taxes and debts and such but I have a relative that is expecting something out of the settlement and I’d rather have no contact with this person ( one of those whiners). So in a perfect world, what is the time-line generally in Canada?

It depends on the size of the estate, what property is in the estate, and if someone contests it and it goes to court. It could take a year or longer.

Wonderful Queensland – The Sunshine State

When a state is blessed with a warm, sunny climate, an abundance of beautiful scenery, and a coastline that is the envy of the world, it is hardly surprising that thousands come each year to visit. Indeed, many locals will tell you that Queensland, with its relaxed lifestyle and friendly atmosphere, is the best place in which to live, work, and retire.

This is a State full of extremes. In the far west the Simpson Desert, with its dunes and inhospitable gibber plains gives way to the Channel Country, an area laced with an intricate web of often dry streams that after heavy rain may spill to cover the land like a vast brown sea.

Eastern Queensland’s spine is the Great Dividing Range, a mighty barrier that separates the fertile coastal plain from the vast outback tracts extending to the State’s western border. Stretching from Cape York to the southern border and beyond, the Great Divide comprises a series of high mountains, tablelands, and low rolling hills. Here, rainforest gives way to eucalypt woodland, waterfalls fed by tropical rains tumble over rock faces and escarpments, and boulder-studded streams flow through deep gorges.

The coastline is another world. Washed by the brilliant blue waters of the Coral Sea, long sandy beaches fringed with tropical vegetation edge the shores, broken only by rocky headlands and mangrove forests. Lying off-shore is a multitude of islands and one of the world’s great natural wonders: the Great Barrier Reef.

The second largest State in Australia, Queensland covers an area of more than 1.7 million square kilometres in the north-east corner of the continent. The northern marine boundary, passing within a few kilometres of Papua New Guinea’s coastline, includes the 200-odd islands lying off Cape York Peninsula in the Torres Strait; to the east, it includes all the islands within the Great Barrier Reef.

Until 1859, Queensland was part of New South Wales. The first European settlement, a penal colony, was established at Moreton Bay in 1824 and soon afterwards was moved to the present site of Brisbane – the State’s capital city. By 1839 nearly all the convicts had been returned to Sydney and the district was opened to free settlers.

The Brisbane settlement grew slowly at first; when the area was proclaimed the Colony of Queensland in 1859 the population was 23,520. Today, the State has a population exceeding 4 million – of which nearly half live in the Brisbane-Ipswich urban area.

For the Aborigines – the original inhabitants of the land – many parts of Queensland are ritual grounds of sacred Dreamtime legends, and there are important traditional rock-art sites, particularly on Cape York Peninsula in the north. It was in this area that a race of hunters and gatherers came to the Australian continent some 40,000 years ago, coming in across the Torres Strait when it was dry land during the last ice age.

Just over half of the State lies between the Tropic of Capricorn and 10 degrees south of the Equator. Inland, the summers are hot, but on the coastal plain the temperatures are milder – with far higher humidity. Winters are much drier and delightfully warm, though in the far south, nights can be quite cold with frost appearing on higher ground. Snow falls occasionally in the highlands near the border around Stanthorpe and Wallangarra.

The rainy season falls between December and March-April, and it is during this time that the coast may be lashed by tropical cyclones. Rainfall varies enormously throughout the State, with the heaviest falls on the north-eastern slopes and coast-lands – Tully averages 4550 mm annually and has the reputation of being the wettest town in Australia. Whereas Birdsville in the far west only averages an annual 150 mm – and in drought it might not rain for years.

Agriculture is a major industry. Cattle and sheep graze on the grassy western plains, their drinking water supplied by a myriad bores that tap the vast store of underground water in the Great Artesian Basin. On the fertile tablelands of the Great Divide and the lush coastal plains farms grow a wide variety of produce from cotton to sugar cane, to peanuts, pineapples and a host of other tropical fruit and vegetables. The State is also rich in mineral deposits including bauxite, coal, oil, copper, silver, and gold. Indeed, the discovery of gold in the last century and the subsequent mining in the 1870s-80s did much to establish many of the coastal and inland centres throughout Queensland.

One of Queensland’s most important growth industries is tourism. Not only have overseas visitors discovered this favourable holiday destination, but Australians from other States now come in huge numbers. In winter, thousands flock to coastal caravan parks and holiday flats to exchange chilly southern days for delectably warm, sunny weather.

Apart from the lure of a warm climate, people return many times over to Queensland because there is just so much to do and see. Self-drive holidays are probably the most popular, but for those who do not wish to drive, there is a vast number of conducted tours to choose from. Accommodation ranges from remote bush camps to five-star luxury hotels with every type imaginable in between.

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Developing a Legal Game Plan to Protect Innovation

 

F. Jason Far-hadian Esq., Principal of Century IP Group (www.centuryip.com) maintains that protecting intellectual property in today’s video game market is necessary to establishing a distinct competitive advantage.

During my recent stay in Seoul Korea, I visited the largest underground entertainment and shopping center in Asia (the COEX Mall), where the Microsoft and Sony corporations have built spacious “game zones,” providing public access to hundreds of game stations and video games for free. Each year the center hosts international competitions where teams of players collectively compete with others online, and before the eyes of large audiences, to win multi-thousand dollar prizes.[1]

Here are a few interesting facts: total sales in the video game industry reached 7.3 billion last year;[2] sales from the online multiplayer games sector by itself is expected to grow to $763 million by 2007;[3] big business in the video game industry is coming from adults, where the average age of a game player is 30;[4] and video games have outsold movie tickets in the United States 10 to 9.[5] Not bad for a business that began as an incidental offspring of the computer software industry.

 

The video game industry, even though still dependent on advancements in the computer software and hardware sectors, has evolved beyond recognition in relation to its humble origins in games such as Pong and Pacman, developed 50 years ago on refrigerator size computers by timid software engineers. Modern video games have intricate storylines, bold colors and a plethora of characters and backdrops. As such, many video games today are written, designed and choreographed by writers, producers, directors and talent with experience in the arts and movie industry before a single line of code is written.

 

For the above reasons, the legal issues related to the protection and enforcement of rights in video game products have become more sophisticated and complex. Luckily, however, various legal means are available to help protect different aspects of a video game product, especially the functional and operational aspects, which may be protected by a patent. Alternatively, certain features may be maintained as trade secrets. Additionally, most characters, scenes, music, dialogues, story lines and source code may be protected under copyright laws as long as each contains original works of authorship.

 

Despite of the availability of the above legal means, there is a surprising and somewhat inexplicable lack of intellectual property protection in the video game industry. This imbalance within the video game industry is cultivating a new and relatively unexploited legal battlefield that is resulting in large judgments against infringers and licensing opportunities for those who have diligently pursued their legal right to obtain and register the respective patents and copyrights.

 

The 1997 case of Alpex Computer Corp. v. Nintendo Co.[6] is among the first cases involving video game patent infringement. In that case, Nintendo was ordered to pay $253 million to Alpex for infringing its patent for a machine configured to play multiple games, in contrast to the older arcade systems that could only play a single game. More recently, in March 2005, the United States Federal court in the Northern District of California found Sony guilty of patent infringement and entered a judgment ordering Sony to pay $84 million to Immersion Corp., which had a patent covering the vibration feature incorporated in the Play Station’s game controller.[7]

 

Accordingly, even simple operational features incorporated in a game may be worthy of patent protection. Such innovations, if properly protected, can potentially provide a distinct advantage to a game developer by way of excluding competitors from using the particular feature in their products.

 

In the realm of copyright protection, certain non-operational but graphical attributes or themes of a video game may be protected by preventing others from altering or modifying such attributes. For example, modding and morphing software are available that allows a player to change the look and feel of a game by adding new levels and characters or otherwise customizing the game based on the player’s preference.

 

The judicial consensus on whether such acts constitute copyright infringement remains unclear.[8] For example, in Microstar, Inc v. FormGen, Inc.,[9] the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held that Micorstar’s act of selling a collection of additional game levels developed for the video game Duke Nukem 3D constituted “derivative work” and infringed the copyrights of the game developer FormGen. Microstar had to enjoin further sales of the product and pay $250,000 in damages. Prior to the Microstar decision, the rights to derivative work had been recognized only in literary works such as novels and films.

 

More recently, in January 2005, Tecmo, Inc., maker of an X-Box game (Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball), sued the operators and users of an online bulletin board service “www.ninja-hacker.net” for posting lines of code that made the characters appear nude. The suit was dismissed in May 2005, due to a settlement between the parties. But it left unanswered the question of whether a rightful owner of a video game can legally modify the game in the same manner that a purchaser of a book can underline the text in the book.

 

Due partially to the ambiguities in copyright law, some video game manufacturers have relied on provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to target companies that distribute modding technologies. In the past, Sony, Microsoft and other companies have successfully gone after distributors of modding chips for violating the provisions of the DMCA that make it unlawful to distribute circumventing technologies such as modding software.

 

It is noteworthy, however, that according to a recent decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the DMCA cannot create new copyright rights, but can only be used to enforce existing rights.[10] So it is no longer clear whether the DMCA will continue to empower video game manufacturers as it did prior to this decision.

 

Regardless of the above uncertainties, the noted progeny of cases confirm that courts recognize the value of intellectual property in video games and will reward the game developers that protect their rights by taking the legal steps to properly register and enforce those rights. In response to the pressing need for legal representation and specialization in the video game industry, certain intellectual property law firms such as the Century IP Group and Morrison & Foerster are further developing their resources to help their clients deal with the legal ramifications of changes in intellectual property law.[11]

 

In today’s competitive video game market, protection of intellectual property is not a luxury, but a necessity for success. A properly registered innovation provides a competitive advantage and further protects the owner from attack by competitors. Therefore, it would be wise for game developers and video game distributors to consult competent legal counsel about how to protect their rights and ideas so that they will have opportunities to both offensively and defensively limit competitor options.

 

F. Jason Far-hadian Esq. concentrates his practice on client counseling, opinions, due diligence and the procurement of patents, copyrights and trademark rights in several technology areas, including electronics, computer software and hardware, telecommunications and wireless devices. He can be reached at jfarhadian@i-p-law.us or visiting www.i-p-law.us. Ms. Jennifer Burcio also contributed to drafting this article.

 

 

[1] “Cashing in on cyber carnage,” James McNair, The Cincinnati Enquirer, September 13, 2005.

[2] “Insider gaming,” Tamara Chuang, The Orange County Register, October 21, 2005.

[3] “Online Game Sites Find Their Lucrative Market Among the Middle-aged”, Kim Peterson, Seattle Times, December 1, 2003. Also see www.gamebattles.com.

[4] Mark D. Rasch, IP Law and Business, July 28, 2005.

[5] “Out of Hollywood, Rising Fascination with Video Games,” Laura M. Holson, New York Times, April 10, 2004.

[6] Alpex Computer Corporation v. Nintendo Company Ltd., 102 F.3d 1214 (Fed. Cir 1997).

[7] Immersion Corp. v. Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc., 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 4781.

[8] “The Mod Squad”, Mark D. Rasch, IP Law and Business, July 28, 2005.

[9] Microstar v. FormGen, Inc. 154 F.3d 1107 (9th Cir. 1998).

[10] Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies, Inc., 2004 CAFC LEXIS 04-1118.

[11] “MOFO Gets its Game On.” Joel Landau, IP Law and Business, August 2, 2004.

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IP Law