About 82% of Canadians were already happy with Obama in February, but this week I suspect he converted a few of the holdouts with his call for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making. All was subsequently peaceful and happy in the U.S. of A., leading to M&A rapprochement between Roche and Genentech and to Gilead Sciences riding to CV Therapeutics’ rescue. 

M&A developments were not so peaceful and happy in Canada, where the Special Committee formed by Patheon’s Board called a takeover bid by JLL Partners “substantially undervalued, opportunistic and structurally coercive.” Merck and Schering-Plough did . . . [more]

A recent show on the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC Click, investigated cybercrimes and how compromised computers could be used to send spam.

But the program didn’t just provide information on current criminal practices, they created their own botnet and accessed 22,000 computers in the U.K. The show informed users they had infected about the vulnerability, and about ways to better protect themselves.

Despite the informative value of the exercise, some critics like Graham Cluley are wondering if they are in violation of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which states,

Computer misuse offences

1 Unauthorised access to computer material

I’ve just noticed the CBC story concerning the Quebec couple who paid a woman $20,000 to be surrogate mother, received the baby, and were refused an adoption by the court when they applied and revealed all of the details concerning the genesis of the child. The takeaway line from the judgment is the peculiar statement that “Cette enfant n’a pas droit à une filiation maternelle à tout prix,” [“This child has no right to a declaration of maternity in spite of everything.” — my weak translation] which the news has picked up as meaning the child has no legal mother. . . . [more]

Out-Law.com reports today that the European Court of Human Rights upheld an English defamation case in which the publication had been online for more than the usual one-year limitation period for defamation suits. [Case of Times Newspapers Ltd (Nos. 1 And 2) v. The United Kingdom]

Though the limitation period runs from publication, each time a web site is accessed is considered a new publication. Thus the limitation period never expires for an online publication.

Does this make sense? (Out-law.com, a publication of the Pinsents law firm in the UK, does not think so.)

On the other hand, . . . [more]

An item in the Times Online law section surprised me this morning. It referred to a private member’s bill coming for second reading before the Lords tomorrow “to create a framework of rights and responsibilities for couples in England and Wales who live together but who are not married.” The Cohabitation Bill is promoted by Lord Lester of Herne Hill. (Nothing about this in Lords of the Blog. Perhaps tomorrow. BTW: someone help them get the “wordpress” out of their URL, please: http://lordsoftheblog.wordpress.com Way too amateur.)

I suppose I knew that the U.K. lacked this sort of protection for . . . [more]

In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly called on the Secretary-General of the organization to establish a database on the nature and consequences of violence against women, and on the impact and effectiveness of policies and programmes to combat it.

The database was launched last week.

There are a number of ways to search the data:

• Country pages
• Advanced search (type of government or policy measure; form of violence; country/region; year; and keyword)
• Good practices

Sources for the information include:

• States parties’ reports to human rights treaty bodies
• Information provided by Member States in follow-up to the Fourth World

Our readers may be interested in an event in Toronto next week. I got a flyer in my mailbox from Olivia Chow, the MP for my riding, advertising a public forum on “how to build a vibrant online arts presence while ensuring fairness for both artists and users.”

The speakers are Charlie Angus (the NDP’s “digital affairs critic”), Michael Geist, Don Quarles, Stephen Waddell and Victoria Owen. It’s scheduled to take place next Wednesday, March 18 at 7 p.m. at the University of Toronto.

See the Flyer . . . [more]

Started in January, the Kluwer Arbitration Blog is from Kluwer Law International. They have pulled together a range of contributors from practice, academia and legal publishing for this focused cooperative blog. From one of their first posts:

The international arbitration world is a unique epistemic community. We come from every corner of the globe and yet we all deeply care about the same issues. We number in the thousands and yet there is a remarkable degree of collegiality among our members. The arbitration world is marked by an astonishing variety of individuals who share the common attributes of cosmopolitanism,

Here is a link to a thoughtful article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology by Hofstra Professor Katrina Fischer Kuh entitled Electronically Manufactured Law – Why the shift to electronic research merits attention.

It seeks to understand how present and future changes in the communication of law, including electronic legal research, influence the legal profession and legal practice. It explores how the shift to electronic research is likely shaping the law in little-noticed, but nonetheless significant, ways. . . . [more]

This morning’s Globe and Mail carried a death notice for Alison Youngman, who spearheaded Stikeman’s Technology and Outsourcing group, dead of cancer at too early an age.

She promoted the adoption of new technologies before it was fashionable to do so. She became a self-taught expert on technology law, creating a nationally recognized Technology and Outsourcing group for Stikemans. She published widely and served her profession by co-chairing the American Bar Association Negotiated Acquisitions Committee Task Force on Joint Ventures.

She was part of the OBA’s Business Law Section on the Modernization of Business Law in Ontario . . . [more]

I just received this message via Facebook:

Hi Creative Commons Cause,
As you have probably heard, Facebook has been revising their terms of service.

This has spawned a grassroots movement inside Facebook to encourage the platform to adopt Creative Commons licenses, similar to Flickr or blip.tv‘s implementation.

The group has gained momentum and already has almost 2,000 members, so we thought we would point it out to you, our supporters.

Check it out if you’re interested in organizing for this feature and see some of the mockups of what CC-in-Facebook might look like:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=55178542061

Thanks for your continued support!

A contentious policy week on both sides of the border:

• In Canada, a meeting this week between the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Gary Goodyear, Canada’s Minister of Science and Technology descended into a shouting match over cuts to research funding announced in Canada’s 2009 federal budget.
• In the U.S., old controversies were stirred by the introduction of the Patent Reform Act of 2009(high-tech vs. biotech); by the Supreme Court’s ruling, in Wyeth v. Levine, that drug makers are not exempt from state tort liability (tort reform vs. plaintiffs’ bar); and by the nomination of Kathleen Sibelius to