It should be no surprise that, with the current market conditions, both developers and purchasers are closely scrutinizing just how firm their contracts are for residential property developments currently under construction. As such, the recent British Columbia Supreme Court decision in Dwane v. Bastion Coast Homes Ltd. drew a lot of attention from developers, pre-sale purchasers, and the media alike in this Province. Though headlines blared Judge lets buyer ditch deal on condo and B.C. court rules pre-sale condo contract invalid, the fact of the matter is that Bastion Coast is little more than the application of pre-existing law. . . . [more]

Bonne fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste à nos amis et confrères dans la belle province.

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I was in an interesting discussion today with colleagues on whether there has been a proliferation of the citation of unreported judgments in judicial decisions in Canada and whether this was a good or bad thing.

The context is this: in the good old days of print case law reporters (e.g., Dominion Law Reports or Ontario Reports) when life was much simpler, qualified editors chose to publish only the significant or important decisions. As such, you knew that when lawyers and judges cited precedent to print case law reporters there was some semblance of authority or quality in the precedent. . . . [more]

On June 22, 2009, Canada’s federal government announced that a team led by the chair of the B.C. Securities Commission, Doug Hyndman, will lead the transition to a new national securities regulator. Mr. Hyndman will be responsible for negotiating with the provinces—each of which currently has its own securities regulator—as well as developing the legislation that outlines the new national regulator’s mandate. A report is due in a year, with an implementation target of three years.

Goodness knows, this is long overdue. In the absence of a single national securities regulator, efforts have been underway for many years to harmonize . . . [more]

Neither civil libertarians nor privacy advocates are likely to be pleased with the two Bills introduced last week by Canada’s federal government, Bills which are intended to give police wider powers to access online data without a warrant. If passed, the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act (Bill C-47) will require Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) and other “telecommunications service providers” to install equipment facilitating the interception of communications, and to allow police access, without a warrant, to the personal information of users including names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and internet protocol addresses. The Investigative Powers . . . [more]

Slaw has discussed a couple of times [* *] whether domain names are property of any kind, including property that can be seized to satisfy creditors. The California Court of Appeal — Palacio del Mar Homeowners Assn., Inc. v. McMahon, Cal.Rptr.3d 2009 WL 1668294 (Cal. App. 4 Dist. June 16, 2009) [PDF] — has recently decided the latter question in the negative: no seizure. (Internet Cases has a summary.)

Part of the issue was whether the domain name was property that could be ‘levied upon by taking it into custody.’ If that’s the test then lots . . . [more]

When we think of intellectual property potection, we usually think of patents, trade-marks and copyright. Less top of mind are registered industrial designs. They protect unique, non-utilitarian design aspects of an article. While they are thought of as a patent – indeed, in the US they are called design patents and are contained within the utility patent database – they are really more akin to trade-marks and copyright.

Read more in my Free Press article on my blog, or on the Free Press site. (For some reason it hasn’t made the Canoe Tech page yet this week.) . . . [more]

I recently helped the Toronto Association of Law Libraries (TALL) set up a Facebook group. I’ve long suspected it: law librarians *love* Facebook. It is a place where we can talk to each other one-on-one, share photos about our personal lives, play word games, and join groups of interest. Almost immediately after creating the TALL group, we had over 30 people sign up by word of mouth. Official word about the group went out a few weeks ago, and we now have more than double that signed up.

Some of our thinking behind creating the group:

• members were asking

White Park Bay, a company that seems to specialize in porting Oxford University Press books to the iPhone, has published a number of OUPs technical dictionaries as iPhone apps, among them the Oxford Dictionary of Law. (This link will take you to it in the app store on your iTunes.) The dictionary sells for CD14.99 (who’s kidding whom with this penny less pricing?). You will note that while rich for an iTunes app, many of which sell at just under a dollar, it’s a whole lot cheaper than the Black’s Law Dictionary, which sells for CD50 (with a penny . . . [more]

I’m a big believer in the idea of a solar panel on every rooftop. It just makes sense to me. I would also like to experience an electric car traffic jam, and to have the power of the ocean used to light my home. Some may say I live in a dream world. Maybe now I do, but our world is changing—and in British Columbia my dream has a chance to become reality, thanks to the provincial government’s commitment to renewable energy. 

Premier Gordon Campbell proclaimed on April 23, 2009 that “We are going to be the alternative energy . . . [more]

The world wide economic downturn is prompting companies to sell non-core business units, consolidate operations and generally downsize. Lately, everyone seems to have at least one article devoted to some aspect of restructuring a business—see, for example, the cover story in the June 2009 edition of LEXPERT magazine.

Despite the fact that restructuring initiatives often have a profound impact on employees, few articles are talking about the human resources implications of restructuring a business. Employees have valuable know-how, technical knowledge, and relationships with customers, so their departure or disaffection can have significant and unintended financial consequences for a company.

CNET . . . [more]

Real competition has finally arrived in the market for legal information. The existence of alternative product offerings from multiple sources has shifted the legal information market in Canada from a seller’s to a buyer’s market. Making matters worse from the perspective of a commercial publisher, although not from that of the legal profession, is the dramatic growth in the number of free sources of online legal information.

To simply stay in the game, commercial publishers will have to offer more content for less money. This shift in the nature of the business is something new in the world of legal . . . [more]