The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is encouraging its members not to sign confidentiality clauses/agreements that prevent them from sharing information in their digital licenses. The press release states that openness in agreements will result in better terms and conditions for libraries.

See the ARL press release at http://www.arl.org/news/pr/nondisclosure-5june09.shtm. . . . [more]

Wolfram Alpha is truly amazing, especially in the demo. Google also recently released a search engine that generates structured responses: Google Squared. It is less impressive, but then the examples provided don’t cover engineering calculations that generate snazzy graphics. Anyhow, both fail miserably for the law topics I tried… . . . [more]

You gotta hand it to the Australians. While we’re talking privacy or IP rights, they’re talking about surfers rights! In a bit of a Friday fun link, see Surfing on a sick day is fine, Australian court rules.

Pretty funny story. He obviously had a better defense than the ‘sick leave, schmick leave‘ I came up with. :)

(HT: QuizLaw) . . . [more]

I had a chance this afternoon to pop into the collection of speaker presentations from the CALL conference, making me regret even more that I was not in attendance this year (thanks to Cynthia Simpson for the long e-mail, detailing everything I missed).

The one that really caught my eye was the presentation by Judith Seiss, Embedded Librarians : Our Future or Our Fear? (the link goes to her paper, but there is also a powerpoint deck on the CALL website). At the risk of spoiling the surprise, the paper muses on the future of libraries and librarians, and supports . . . [more]

Since I was just asked for this decision and it’s not on Canlii yet, here is a link to the Federal Court’s decision yesterday.

Strong words from Zinn J for Foreign Affairs, CSIS and the handling of the case.

. . . [more]

From the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) blog.

Adobe expects to deliver security updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat versions 7.x, 8.x, and 9.x for Windows and Macintosh on Tuesday, June 9. This is the first quarterly security update for Adobe Reader. Adobe considers this a critical update and recommends users be prepared to apply the update for their product installations. Details of where to download updates will be posted to Adobe’s Security Bulletins and Advisories support page on June 9. . . . [more]

Flickr is one of the roaring dot com successes… Modest start, Canadian connection, unfortunate trend setter for dropping the ‘e’ in ‘er’, huge sale to Yahoo! And now with an astonishing two billion photographs on board. How to mine this wealth? Well, there are a good many ways — in addition to Flickr’s own search function — it seems, and in today’s fillip I’ll take a very brief look at a few of them.

Compfight helps you find photos you can use — because they’re licensed under one or another Creative Commons license. As well, you can ask it to . . . [more]

Who doesn’t love Org Charts? Thanks to Karen Sawatzky re-tweeting Mark Eaton, I have a new source to feed my desire to see collections of organization charts, Org Charts by Cogmap.

What is Cogmap?

Cogmap is the Wikipedia of organization charts. We are an organization chart wiki! This means that it is a collection of organization charts online that anyone can edit, add to, and help maintain.

Cogmap is a tool for sales people, entrepreneurs, and recruiters to understand organizations and keep information up to date. If you are like us, you had some of these things happen to

We’ve talked a little about litigation around domain names of famous people. But what about accounts on social media platforms?

Tony LaRusa, manager for the St. Louis Cardinals, is suing Twitter at the Superior Court of the State of California for a now inactive account that bore his name and likeness in LaRusa v. Twitter, Inc.

Although close scrutiny of the account does indicate it was not really LaRusa’s (citing parody), they did make off-the-cuff remarks like,

Lost 2 out of 3, but we made it out of Chicago without one drunk driving incident or dead pitcher.

LaRusa had apparently . . . [more]

The University of Toronto’s David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights has a new website. Within U of T’s Faculty of Law, the Centre is “devoted to advocacy, research and education in the areas of constitutional rights in Canada.”

At the moment the resources available via the site seem to be those culled from the normal operation of the Faculty of Law, i.e. relevant journal articles and books. There’s an interesting section on “Cross-Canada Appellate Cases,” which lists some recent cases from across the country and offers brief summaries of the issues involved. I’d recommend that they have an . . . [more]

In the new world order of feeds and blogs and tweets, we don’t talk about newsletters anymore.

Yes my friends, newsletters still exist! Michel-Adrian posted about finding law firm newsletters and Ted mentioned the CCH Law Student newsletter and we all know about the collection of law firm publications at Lexology.

Although the lines blur with technology, I suggest that to be labeled a newsletter, the information must be sent in hard copy or be made available electronically with some sign up action on the part of the recipient. Though signing up for information by a recipient may seem . . . [more]

Back in April I wrote a somewhat sarcastic article here on slaw.ca criticising the new Road Safety Act (“RSA”) as allowing “convictions without trials” (https://www.slaw.ca/2009/04/22/8208/). The story took on a bit of a life of its own resulting in some TV appearances that in turn generated a fair bit of commentary from the general public. One theme that ran through a vocal minority of those who called in to the talk shows took me to task for “overreacting” or being “alarmist” in my complaint that the RSA authorized police to issue tickets from which there is no appeal. . . . [more]