Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, Patrick Monahan, has accepted the invitation of the President of York University to become York’s new Vice-President Academic and Provost. President Shoukri has indicated that the search for a new dean for the law school will be thorough and will take some time. Osgoode Professor Jinyan Li has agreed to become interim dean, during the search process. . . . [more]

Yesterday’s New York Times article Copyright Challenge for Sites that Excerpt by Brian Stelter explores the boundaries as to what is acceptable with regard to excerpting from news stories by other websites, and what is causing news publishers to become uncomfortable. When is it acceptable to quote the majority of an article in a blog post? Is it okay to take a whole RSS feed from a news source (which they are freely supplying), and republish it on a website with additional advertising?

It seems that it all depends on who is doing the republishing. Prominent free news aggregator Google . . . [more]

Lots of biotech and pharma deal activity is ongoing in Canada and around the world, including Roche’s debt offering to fund its Genentech bid and an unsolicited offer by JLL Partners for Patheon, which was founded in Canada.

New regulations are on the way for organic food in Canada, where cloned animals will be excluded; and for genetic information in the U.S., where the EEOC started hearings to implement Title II of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.

Regulatory optimism from GTC Biotherapeutics, which started a collaboration with New Zealand’s AgResearch for animal-produced biosimilars; but pessimism from . . . [more]

Over two years ago, Simon Chester noted,

75 percent of all traffic on the Internet is due to file sharing, with 59 percent of that file sharing attributed to people swapping video files. Music tracks account for 33 percent of the file-sharing traffic. E-mail, it turns out, accounts for just 9 percent of the total traffic.

Well it turns out that all that file sharing activity is not without risk.

Tiversa, a Pennsylvania-based company that monitors peer-to-peer file sharing, revealed this week that they found a transfer of military information from a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., to . . . [more]

I’m pleased to report that Jeremy Grushcow has joined Slaw as a regular contributor. Jeremy is a Foreign Legal Consultant (Illinois, New York) practising corporate law at Ogilvy Renault LLP in Toronto. He has a particular focus on life science and technology companies, and brings to bear a doctorate in molecular genetics and cell biology and a law degree from the University of Chicago. Jeremy already blogs at his Cross-Border Biotech Blog, together with Dani Peters and Beni Rovinski, and will provide us with regular updates on developments in his fields of interest.

Please welcome Jeremy Grushcow to Slaw. . . . [more]

Last summer, I was asked by a client at a small administrative tribunal to help with an interesting project. Over the organization’s 20-year history, it had accumulated a number of “issues files”, which document the evolution of its thinking on a range of questions and problems which had arisen over time. The collection was a valuable store of corporate knowledge and history, but it was difficult to know where to look for a particular piece of information or to know what questions might be answered by using these files. Could we recommend a way of cataloguing the contents of these . . . [more]