I see one of the most-quoted posts today on Twitter is All publicly funded content should be in the public domain from popular blog Boing Boing, written by Jesse Brown, host of TV Ontario’s Search Engine podcast. Since he pulls CBC, Telefilm, the Canadian Television Fund and The Canada Council for the Arts into his argument, I thought we (as good Canadians) should have a look at the position he posits. It is:

I think that any publicly funded content should (within, say, 5 years of its creation) be released to the public domain.

Thoughts? (Un-Canadians welcome. Let’s open an

Danske Dagblades Forening, a Danish newspaper industry body, is suing Infopaq, a Danish clippings service, over its reproduction of 11-word snippets of news for sale to clients. The European Court of Justice stated that copyright law would apply to extracts even if they contained just 11 words. However, the Court has not yet ruled in this case. The Court stated that it is up to a national court to decide first whether a newspaper article has copyright protection (though generally newspaper articles are protected by copyright.) . . . [more]

As recently posted here, the CanLII website will soon have all Canadian jurisdictions included in its new point-in-time legislation publication system. I thought that slaw readers would be interested in having some more insight about the project. Let’s begin with preliminary figures and some trivia about legislation available online from governments’ websites, which are the source of CanLII’s databases.

Over 6,000 updated public Acts are available online in all Canadian jurisdictions, averaging about 450 per jurisdiction. These figures double for corresponding enabled regulations. Not surprisingly, the Province of Ontario posts the largest number of effective public acts – . . . [more]

When I got back from vacation just over a week ago I discovered there was an elephant in the room: a possible looming federal election that no one really wanted to discuss. Except, perhaps, the media. We’ve even avoided discussing it here on Slaw for whatever reason (are we just too polite to talk politics in public? How very Canadian). In the meantime we have a lovely trio of election-related controversies from which to sample: . . . [more]

That’s the message from an interesting piece in yesterday’s NYT entitled A Legal Battle: Online Attitude vs. Rules of the Bar .

Short extract suggests more issues in the future:

Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University Law School, sees many more missteps in the future, as young people who grew up with Facebook and other social media enter a profession governed by centuries of legal tradition.

“Twenty-somethings have a much-reduced sense of personal privacy,” Professor Gillers said. Younger lawyers are, predictably, more comfortable with the media than their older colleagues, according to a recent survey

There was a piece in the Globe & Mail on Saturday (12 September, 2009, page A21) entitled, “Information-rich and attention poor” by Peter Nicholson. Nicholson’s argument is that it has become very inexpensive to produce “knowledge” and correspondingly very much more expensive to analyze what is produced. In language strikingly reminiscent of Robert Pirsig, Nicholson talks about the extent to which speed of access to knowledge has replaced depth or analysis. He says:

“… When the effective shelf-life of a document (or any information product) shrinks, fewer resources will be invested in its creation. This is because the period during . . . [more]

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice released its decision on an application in York University v. Bell Canada Enterprises this Friday. The case is based on an allegedly defamatory e-mail about the President of York University, Mamdouh Shoukri, saying he had “perpetrated an outrageous fraud.”

A group calling itself “York Faculty Concerned About the Future of York University” protested the appointment of Martin Singer of the new Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, questioning his credentials and attaching a letter from other academics who did disclose their names.

But the University is more interested in the identity of . . . [more]

Are rapping Klingons the answer to copyright violation? Probably not.

In 1992, the Software Publishers Association, now the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), released a video, “Don’t Copy that Floppy,” aimed at youth to curb the use of copyrighted materials such as games. The video starred a rapper-lawyer M.E. Hart, as well as interviews with various persons from the industry.

The digitally remastered 1992 video is available on Hart’s YouTube Channel.

This past week SIIA released a sequel to the video, focusing on copyright of games, music, and software. It starts out with a bunch of contemporary . . . [more]

I’ve just started my LLM at U of T and am considering a paper/article on the limits of prosecutorial discretion. A defining personal example for me is the racing legislation under the Ontario HTA. With that legislation the Ontario Government created a circumstance where 2 identical fact situations could be subject to two different charges under the HTA at the discretion of the crown. Given that there’s unlikely to be much high level discussion of matters related to the HTA, I’m interested if any SLAW members are aware of other statutes (provincial or federal) where two identical fact situations could . . . [more]

This is old now, but I just found a recording of an interesting 2007 talk by Carl Malamud about his efforts to cajole US Government agencies and Canadian corporations into recognizing and acting on the public domain status of all US government info, including, of course, case law. (Re-)Defining the Public Domain is available at Berkeley’s School of Information as audio, and also with his slideshow. To find the law content, skip ahead to 38:12 of the video version. Some really choice quotes here, and the whole thing is a great introduction to his strategic, and very . . . [more]

Laws is an anagram of Slaw. So is awls. And that’s about it. Fascinating, huh?

Not really? Okay, then, how about this? Slaw is likely one of the few words that has no anagrams in the major European languages or Latin. (With the exception of Dutch — Wals, as in 1-2-3, 1-2-3, etc. — which is here deemed not to be a major European language.)

See how much innocent fun there is to be had by playing with anagrams? All of this and even more merriment is available free online, courtesy of the Internet Anagram Server. From which . . . [more]

(This article comes from the latest issue of LAWPRO’s new Webzine.)

When times are good, bumps in the road won’t always cause problems. Clients are upbeat and they want the deal to close, their problem resolved or the litigation matter to proceed. Happy clients are far less likely to sue their lawyers for malpractice.

However, in tough times, clients squeezed by money problem scan become unhappy and they will be more likely to look for ways to allege that their lawyers made a mistake. In a similar fashion, lawyers squeezed by financial problems can also find themselves more likely . . . [more]