On the News Release site on the Supreme Court of Canada’s site, http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/news_release/2008/08-03-20.3/08-03-20.3.html, i.e., for 20 March, 2008, there is a note that the application for leave to appeal in III Canada Acquisition Company, et al. v. Ernst & Young Inc. was dismissed. (I saw the case mentioned in Eugene Meehan’s weekly letter of that date and wanted to track it down.) The case is stated to be on appeal from the Ontario Court of Appeal.

It is, in fact, impossible to find the reasons for judgment of the Court of Appeal, using this style of cause, on . . . [more]

Riffing on the collaboration note in Simon’s post on Shirkey’s new book, the Library of NYU has just announced a new partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book

The partnership will support, as their first project, new tools to advance the potential of the MediaCommons, which is an ongoing experiment in the potential of the internet to facilitate better scholarship.

One of the Institute’s most accessible inventions is the CommentPress, a WordPress extention that allows for paragraph-level comments on blog posts, reviving for the internet the traditional practice of creating marginalia. . . . [more]

mesh08 is finally approaching! This 2-day Web conference is again being held in May (May 21st and 22nd) and tickets are now on sale. Visit the mesh site for the list of keynotes, panelists and other speakers on board so far. A new feature added for this year is meshU, a full day of hands-on workshops and panels for start-ups, web designers and developers being held on May 20th.

I’ve been attending mesh for the past 2 years and I can’t recommend a more inspiring Web conference experience. . . . [more]

Clay Shirky, who writes on the effects of the internet and technology on society, recently published Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. If you’d like to get a sense of what he has to say on the subject of groups, you should take a look at a [40-minute] video of his talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center.

Shirky has also started a blog focused on the book.

Given the recent emphasis on collaboration as the coming thing among lawyers (see, e.g., What’s Hot – According to New York Legal Tech and Collaboration on Slaw.), Shirky’s . . . [more]

An organization called the Global Kids’ Digital Media Initiative launched the International Justice Center last week in support of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The official ceremony featured ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Lloyd Axworthy (former foreign affairs minister of Canada), Louise Arbour (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice), Allan Rock (former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations), and Kenneth Roth (Executive Director, Human Rights Watch).

The Center will use web technologies and ensure a presence in the virtual reality world of Second Life to mobilize young people around human . . . [more]

Net neutrality has slipped away even further in Canada recently, as Bell has “shaped” the bandwidth available to ISPs that rent space on the network from Bell, slowing down peer-to-peer transmissions in some cases from 5MB/sec to 60KB/sec. Bell has apparently shaped the traffic of its own direct customers for some time, but has until now kept their hands off other ISPs. The Globe and Mail article reporting this story estimates that p2p traffic accounts for something like 80% of online bandwidth use — that by perhaps 10% of all users.

The issue of throttling (as this restriction is sometimes . . . [more]

From the Wall Street Journal, here’s a cautionary tale about relying too heavily on new technology to give you the right answer. Apparently GPS devices have been steering drivers wrong all around the US. The article tells the story of a man who, following the directions of the disembodied voice, found himself staring out over a 200-foot cliff in New Mexico.

One of the problems is that the software in the devices has difficulty distinguishing between a highway and a dirt track – only one of which is appropriate to take your car down of course.

I may be stretching . . . [more]

Those of you who would like to catch up on what happened with law and technology in Europe last year might want to take a look at CMS Cameron McKenna‘s Technology Annual Review [PDF], released last week.

From the Foreword:

Topics in this year’s Review include: selling spam lists, illegal spyware, software copyright, VoIP, the i-Gasm, CD-WOW, the Fresh Prince, E-Commerce defences, data retention, digital downloads, domain name decisions, patent ambushes, the smiley :-), Bluetooth spam, and much, much more.

I’m fairly certain I myself missed the i-Gasm.

[via Lexology – registration required] . . . [more]

For all you law and IT lovers, I am pleased to announce that Leg@l.IT is back this year! With Canada’s Privacy Commissionner, Jennifer Stoddart, and Prof. Pierre Trudel as co-presidents, three tracks with the most interesting and en vogue subjects (here is the agenda) and an impressive group of speakers, including fellow Slawers (Simon Chester, Jordan Furlong and Vincent Gautrais) and blogger (David Bilinsky), it is THE event you don’t want to miss!

Leg@l.IT is an accessible and spearheading conference, the most important of this kind in Canada, about the potential and . . . [more]

Did you miss the deadline? The Privacy Commission of Canada posted a contest to their blog last week, looking for slogans and designs for T-shirts they are planning to hand out at conferences. Unfortunately they did not give a lot of lead time; deadline was March 25th. I think the concept is a great one and would have liked to try my hand at a slogan or two. I’m sure fellow Slawyers would have come up with something witty. I’ll keep an eye on it, whether they extend the deadline.

Link courtesy of Vancouver web marketing guru Kate Trgovac . . . [more]

A study from the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review reportedly finds that the question of whether an exchange is a sale or a licensing agreement is not entirely a matter of contract. According to Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and Sivacracy,

…just because Sony or Amazon call it a license, that doesn’t make it so. “That’s a factual question determined by courts,”…

From the summary:

The (Potential) Legal Validity of E-book Reader Restrictions By Rajiv Batra, John Padro, Seung-Ju Paik and Sarah Calvert

Many users are unhappy that e-book readers, such as the Sony Reader and the Amazon

The latest issue of the Virginia Law Weekly contains a look back at the law school from 1958 to 1967, a period so far back in history that even I was back in school.

But I was surprised to read one sentence about the firm library:

In 1962 the head law librarian attended a meeting to assess the workability of a “computer-like” machine designed to index and retrieve whole bodies of legal information

Okay Slaw, what was this about? . . . [more]