Bio
Howard P. Knopf, B.A., M.S., LL.M., is counsel with Macera & Jarzyna, LLP in Ottawa, Canada. He has worked in government and the private sector, mainly in the areas of copyright, trademarks, cyber law, competition and related issues.
Howard has been chairman of the Copyright Policy Committee of the Canadian Bar Association and was adviser to the Law Commission of Canada on security interests in intellectual property. He edited the resulting book entitled Security Interests in Intellectual Property. He spent more than a decade in the Canadian federal government and has published extensively, both as an author and editor.
Howard has been a member of the faculty of the annual Fordham International Intellectual Property Law and Policy Conference in New York since 2000. He has been an adjunct law lecturer at Queen’s University and was cited by Canadian Lawyer magazine as being one of Queen’s law faculty’s “best and brightest.” He has appeared as counsel before the Copyright Board, the Canadian Artists and Producers Professional Relations Tribunal, the Federal Court, the Federal Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada.
Howard has served as a panellist in cases involving the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. He has been an adviser on policy issues to the Government of Canada and WIPO. His litigation successes include important decisions in the Federal Court, the Federal Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada on issues involving file sharing, privacy, private copying levies, parallel importation, fair dealing and whether Copyright Board tariffs are mandatory. He has appeared several times on various issues before parliamentary and Senate committees in Canada.
Prior to his legal career, he was a professional clarinetist performing in Canada, the United States and Europe, and frequently for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Howard maintains a widely read blog on copyright law and is often quoted in Canadian and foreign media.