Having taken Labour Day off, I present a double edition of biotech highlights:

Double Money:

• Genome BC and Genome Canada put $3.4 million into a grape and wine genomics project that will try to bring molecular techniques to bear on winemaking. And…
• The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) is providing $50 million to BDC for direct investments in “early-stage firms in Southern Ontario” and for investments in VC funds “focused on Ontario-based opportunities.”

Double Caution:

• An article in the New York Times called direct-to-consumer genetic testing “fraught with potential dangers.” And…
• The FDA revised

I got done for speeding a while back and went to trial (a year later) to plead guilty to a reduced speed, so to speak. The brush with the (quasi)criminal system — my first since being put in the slammer for parking tickets way back when I was a callow scofflaw — was interesting, if only because there was a steady parade of semi-sheepish drivers from all walks of life passing through the same system on that day.

The speeding law is one of the most frequent points of contact between the public and “the law,” I’d say. Which makes . . . [more]

Members of the Slaw community might remember an article I wrote some weeks ago entitled Twittercles in which I marvelled at the impact Twitter had on our student recruitment this year.

As a follow-up, I invite you to read a wonderful piece authored by the student Twitter helped us to discover, Joel Welch. As a former RCMP officer turned defence lawyer, Joel has a fascinating perspective on both sides of the criminal law fence and I think you may be interested in hearing his musings.

Arrested Development. . . . [more]

We have been the object of a number of phony comments that passed the reCaptcha test and the Akismet comment spam filter. Although we delete these annoyances as soon as we can, they go out on the comment RSS feed before we can stop them, unfortunately.

To prevent this we are now forcing some comments into moderation. The arrangement is that if you have ever had an approved comment on Slaw, your future comments will not be moderated. (We reserve the right to delete them, even so, if they offend our comment policy, set out in the next paragraph.) We . . . [more]

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]