794 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 5 SEPTEMBER 2021
over the southwest arm of Kinbasket Lake. Neptune wins with the Neptune
Bank in Vancouver Harbour, Neptune Creek north of Trail, Neptune Peak
(also on Kinbasket Lake) and Neptune Glacier on said peak. Only distant
Uranus (is it even a planet?) and Venus fail to merit an official place name
in British Columbia.
An advertisement in The British Columbian newspaper in 1882 noted: “Prof
Vertelli will walk across a tight rope, blindfolded, pushing a wheelbarrow,
across the street, at 6 o’clock. Don’t fail to see him.”
Harveen Thauli was selected as a roster arbitrator for the Ordinary and
Doping Tribunals of the Sports Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada
(“SDRCC”) for a four-year term ending in April 2025. The SDRCC is an independent,
not-for-profit organization that ensures access to alternative dispute
resolution solutions for all participants in the Canadian sport system
at the national level.
Senator Mobina Jaffer, Q.C., received the South Asian Bar Association of
North America’s Pioneer Award for 2020.
Having just ended the COVID-19 state of emergency, the whole of the
Province of British Columbia returned to a state of emergency in late July
due to the threat of interface fires.
All in a day’s work … The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois,
Eastern Division was faced in Wavelength Film Co. v. Columbia Pictures
Industries Inc., 631 F. Supp. 305 (N.D. Ill. 1986) with the defendants’ motion
for summary judgment seeking dismissal of a copyright infringement
claim. The issue before the court was whether the plaintiff’s motion picture,
Wavelength, was sufficiently similar to the defendants’, Starman, to raise a
genuine issue of copyright infringement. The court found that no genuine
issue existed, after noting, for example, that “the aliens’ disposition towards
earth people differs dramatically in both films”. In this regard, the Wavelength
aliens “murder numerous civilian and military personnel”, while the
Starman alien “restores life to a dead animal and to his dead earth lover, the
protagonist. At no time does the ‘Starman’ alien murder an earth person.”
Further, while both spacecraft were orange spherical objects, “the ‘Starman’
spacecraft caused a snowfall effect in the Arizona desert. The ‘Wavelength’
sphere had no such effect.” Beyond that, the plaintiff’s “remaining claims of
actionable similarity fall within the category of unprotectible ‘scenes a
faire’”, which “consist of characters, settings, or events which necessarily