An ad hoc group called the International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property has released a report, “Toward a New Era of Intellectual Property: from Confrontation to Negotiation,” that is available at the website of The Innovation Partnership. It seems that the core movers behind the report come from McGill University’s Centre for Intellectual Property.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the 40-page report, seven years in the making, calls for a reform of the IP system to return it to its root purpose of supporting innovation. An Executive Summary is available in PDF.

What strikes me is . . . [more]

Boing Boing has a recent post that refers to a day of protest being organized in the EU. Some excerpts:

An international protest against undue surveillance is being held next month on the 11th of October. It is ‘a broad movement of campaigners and organizations is calling on everybody to join action against excessive surveillance by governments and businesses’. We need to get this on the radar for the elections in the USA this year, the EU parliamentary elections next year and many more.

People who constantly feel watched and under surveillance cannot freely and courageously stand up for their . . . [more]

♫ If you’ve got a plan
If you’ve got a master plan
Got to vote for you
Hey hey, got to vote for you
‘Cause you’re the man… ♫

Words and music by: Marvin Gaye and Kenneth Stover.

The fall election – in both Canada and the USA – is taking place at a particularly interesting time. Courtesy of blogs, the public are making their voices heard to a degree that has not been possible in the past. Access to the media was not particularly easy in the past, but by virtue of the Internet, that no longer matters . . . [more]

Lexis has released a web search page, LexisWeb, that offers, in effect, federated searching across an unspecified number of law-related web pages from sites vetted by Lexis editorial staff.

From the user guide [PDF]:

The Lexis Web product includes important, legal-oriented Web content selected and validated by the LexisNexis editorial staff. You can trust that all content has met LexisNexis criteria for being authoritative and accurate. The current beta version combines content from thousands of Web sites and millions of Web pages, with more being added each day:

• Governmental agency information (federal, state, local)
• Informal commentary on

Here’s a link to a Tyee piece on the opening of the Community Court in Vancouver, and here’s some other background. It is based on New York’s Midtown Community Court, which has an interesting publications page. The courts are based on the Community Justice movement, which seems to have its origins in the UK and utilizes the Action Research approach. Here is a good entry into the literature. . . . [more]

The Sedona Conference Institute is offering the 1st Annual Sedona Canada Program on Getting Ahead of the e-Discovery Curve, to be held at the Boulevard Club in Toronto on October 23 – 24.

This information-packed Conference will include panels focused on (1) The Sedona Canada Principles; (2) Management of Electronic Information; (3) Cost-Shifting and Sanctions – Judicial Advice; (4) Legal Holds: The Trigger and the Process; (5) Multi-Party, Multi-Jurisdictional, Class Actions & Other Complications; and (6) Cooperation with Opposing Counsel on eDiscovery
Issues.

For a complete agenda, a run-down on the faculty, and a registration form, visit the Program . . . [more]

As Michel-Adrien Sheppard reported here last week, the Supreme Court of Canada has a newly refurbished website. It was in fact launched over the weekend and is now up and running.

I find the re-design an improvement: there’s a more open feel from a greater use of white and lighter colours. The old site had a tendency to feel a bit claustrophobic at times.

If you’d like to see how the site had changed over time, pay a visit to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, where there are S.C.C. pages from 1998 to the present. Sadly, the . . . [more]

The federal, provincial and territorial justice ministers had a meeting for several days this week and in their final press release said, among other things:

Mandatory reporting of child pornography
Ministers agreed that Canada’s response to child pornography could be enhanced by federal legislation requiring any agency whose services could be used to facilitate the commission of online child pornography offences to report suspected material.

Will “any agency” include telecoms? ISPs? Search engines? What others?

Will the response to this problem be ehanced by mandatory reporting? …Are the various “agencies” contemplated here now reluctant to assist, so that legislation is . . . [more]

Former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson once said in a letter to his first wife, Ellen Axson, two years before they got married,

The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other. It was once the same road; and Congress is [s]till full of lawyers.

One-hundred and twenty-five years later, and across an international border, this quote still holds true. A quick search of current members of the House demonstrates that 45 of the 308 MPs have their occupation listed as “lawyer.”

Earlier . . . [more]

The Public Policy Forum has released a report, “(Not as) Male, (Not as) Educated, (Not as) Experienced & (Still) White,” [PDF] by Jonathan Dignan, analysing the makup of our 39th Parliament and comparing it to comparable data for the current U.S. House of Representatives and the British Parliament. Among the many interesting nuggets are the facts that (only?) just under 16% of MPs are lawyers; 86.5% have attended university but only 32% have university degrees; and the cost of campaigns in Canada is much less than those in the U.S. and much more than those in the U.K: . . . [more]

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has nominated Nova Scotia Court of Appeal judge Thomas Cromwell to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada.

If appointed, he will fill the seat left vacant when Michel Bastarache retired earlier this year.

Justice Cromwell has worked at the Court before. He was the executive legal officer to former Supreme Court chief justice Antonio Lamer.

And I have heard that he loves law libraries. . . . [more]

Got the time? Who’s got time anymore. Time was… My best time ever.

Oh, and billable time.

Slaves to the clock and the watch (and now the cell phone), we need to know the time. So this week’s fillip is a Slaw Six, offering up half a dozen somewhat amusing ways to know when your time is coming… now… up… and gone.

1. The broad strokes first: you’ve got to know what day it is before that fact that it’s twenty to nine can have any real impact. To help you out in that regard let’s make use of the “