Today is a holiday in many, if not most, places in Canada. How and whether this holiday comes to be is itself perhaps a significant portrait of the country itself: in some provinces it is a statutory holiday; in other provinces it is a civic holiday, and up to municipalities to name and proclaim; in still others it is no holiday at all but business as usual. The thing has various names: Natal Day, Simcoe Day, British Columbia Day… The following chart from CanadaInfo will give at least some sense of order (if not peace and good government):

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I’ve discovered through the latest Language Log column, “Trademark Insanity,” that Dell Computers has applied to have “cloud computing” registered as a trade mark in the U.S. and that, with the Opposition Period over, a Notice of Allowance has been issued. Slashdot has some information on who has used the term when, it seeming clear that Dell has no special claim. . . . [more]

That great Canadian blogger Rob Hyndman has a good piece on the sad news that William Patry is closing down his copyright blog. Patry has two reasons: first, because he can’t get people to treat what he says as personal, as having no connection to his work as Google’s copyright counsel; and second, more unhappy, because the current state of copyright law is truly depressing. Rob notes that Larry Lessig abandoned the field because of a “corruption” of the political process.

Read both entries. . . . [more]

You may have noticed the new Quicklaw/LexisNexis copy link icon. It was announced in the LexisNexis Research Update, June 2008 issue, and more recently in What’s New, July 24, 2008. (The latter link provides an illustration.) As I indicated in this old Slaw post, I have been waiting rather impatiently for this announcement ever since I first saw the new Quicklaw demonstrated. This functionality had been present for a long time in classic LexisNexis, and even existed in the new (Rosetta) Australia, New Zealand, and UK LexisNexises when new Quicklaw arrived. It had been . . . [more]

Here is a link to an interesting segment in Fox Business’s digital innovations scheme. This time it’s about FastCase’s challenge to the empires of West/Thomson in Eagan, MN and Reed Elsevier in Dayton OH. The interview talks about possible patents on the search algorithm, but nothing is on the USPTO yet. . . . [more]

Canadian lawyers should familiarize themselves with the Homeland Security policy on inspections of laptops at the border released a couple of weeks ago. Note the provisions at E (3) on claims of legal privilege. . . . [more]

I am humbled by the invitation to join the illustrious team that has turned Slaw.Ca into Canada’s leading legal group blog. It’s a great site and I hope that I can contribute in a positive way. My day job is privacy and technology law, with a little bit of related blogging on the side at the Canadian Privacy Law Blog. I’m pleased to have an opportunity to write a bit about “things legal” that are not necessarily about privacy or technology. (Although I’ve come to think everything is about privacy and technology.)

If I sound like I enjoy what . . . [more]

This fillip is about law, oddly, but a law far more profound than any made by parliaments. I speak of Muphry’s Law.

Well, no, actually, I didn’t, but thanks for asking. Muphry’s [sic] Law was created sixteen years ago by John Bangsund in The Society of Editors Newsletter and given expression thus:

(a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; (b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; (c) the stronger the sentiment

Law library podcast The Law Librarian is set to continue recording next Friday, August 8th at 3 pm CST. The show is hosted by Richard Leiter and Brian Striman, and we first made note of it back in May.

Today’s guest is Margie Maes (some readers may know her as Margie Axtmann), Executive Director of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, a committee of AALL. Margie is also an active CALL member; I first met her on a CALL Vendor Liaison Committee panel a number of years ago when she was serving on AALL‘s equivalent . . . [more]

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has made available free a 138 page e-book, “THE FBI: A Centennial History, 1908-2008.” You may read it online (HTML format) or download the PDF files for each chapter or for the book as a whole; I’d recommend PDF if only for the photographs throughout, which are absent from the HTML version. The various chapters are as follows:

Dedication/Foreword
The Nation Calls, 1908-1923
The FBI and the American Gangster, 1924-1938
World War, Cold War, 1939 to 1953
And Justice for All, 1954-1971
Crime and Corruption Across America, 1972-1988
A World of Trouble,