We haven’t heard much on Slaw about the legal situation with LawBuzz yet.

It’s been covered by the Law Times, Precedent, PRWeb, and Michael Geist, so I won’t go into the details of the case. A blog established by unknown authors (I asked) has also been set up dedicated to the suit. Some potentially defamatory posts were made about AdviceScene, resulting in litigation that has again raised some serious questions about online comment.

I was first exposed to the site in my first year of law school, when a member of our Student Legal Society . . . [more]

Well, there are a number of important issues coming to the surface as the Olympics open. Created by Canadians for Canadians, these issues are not Olympics-related, but are Olympics-occasioned.

• Most promenently, the Civil Liberties of opponents of the Games
• Rights of the Homeless
• Trademark infringement impunity (see comment 1)
• and perhaps least prominently, Architects

And probably others I have missed… . . . [more]

What shall we name the baby?

Put aside the fact that relatively few names work for boys but anything at all seems to go for girls nowadays, there are the matters of nicknames, faux pas with initials, unfortunate translations . . . and then rhyming.

Laura Wattenberg does a riff on rhyming on the Baby Name Wizard site, starting with the fuss that gets made of the fact that nothing rhymes with “orange.” What, she asks sensibly, rhymes with “purple”?

What’s it got to do with names? Well, she asks us to compare two names, Kayden and Faith. Although Faith . . . [more]

As today is the opening of Vancouver Olympic Games, I thought we could celebrate in the Slaw way, which is by looking at the legal aspects of the event. In looking at the Olympics there has been no small amount of legislative activity both Federally and in B.C. regarding the games. I’m not going to get into the court activity in this post.

Federal

The IOC is always extremely vigilant in protecting their trademarks and in Canada an act has been passed to guarantee that:
The Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act, S.C. 2007, c.25

There is the small . . . [more]

Most of us today are blithely heading for our own personal data disasters. We generate and store vast volumes of information, but few of us really look after it.

So says the New Scientist. And then there’s the matter of professional data. Ever since solicitors invented deed boxes and tying docs up in pink ribbon — £31.08 for 109 yards — lawyers have fretted over the safe storage of information. Now that much of what’s important isn’t amenable to loops of ribbon or even file folders, old practices alone are no longer adequate.

The New Scientist piece introduces two . . . [more]

I dislike waiting. Someone doing a word association test would never blurt my name as a response if the word “patience” was provided. Lucky for me, tomorrow ends the wait for the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Tercon Contractors Ltd. v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of the Province of British Columbia by her Ministry of Transportation and Highways.

There is a considerable amount of commentary about Tercon available from a wide variety of sources on the web:

• Tercon Heads For Supreme Court Showdown
• Supreme Court weighs the rules around bidding
• Supreme Court of Canada to Hear

In the U.S. there’s a League of Technical Voters the aim of which is to motivate and assist “technical experts to improve lawmaking and governmental process.” Citability.org, a project supported by that league and other organizations, is tackling one small part of the lawmaking-improvement process by urging “advanced permalinks” on American legislatures. Their complaints about the situation outside commercial databases are familiar:

• links to statutes too often go to large PDF files;
• where there are HTML files of legislation online, it isn’t possible to link to particular clauses within the legislation
• when legislation changes, earlier online versions of provisions

We’re used to seeing law firms breaking new ground in deploying technologies for marketing purposes, but I hadn’t seen a law firm sponsoring a television channel – and one devoted to matters legal.

What’s even more remarkable is where it’s coming from. Not some US powerhouse, or a tech-savvy firm in rural Canada.

No this news comes from Bucharest, (which as Simon reminded us Romania outranks Canada in its electronic infrastructure), where Juridic TV, the first television channel dedicated to public legal information, was launched online on February 8 and will broadcast an around-the-clock daily programme. . . . [more]

Three cases that are making their way through the Ontario court system have a few things in common: they’re all recent, all under the Class Proceedings Act, they’re all significant claims and they all name prominent Toronto law firms as defendants. . . . [more]

The war of the Twilight documentary films is on, and producers who shop their film concepts around to distributors may be thinking twice about what more they can do to protect their hatchling ideas. It has been reported that Summit Entertainment LLC has filed a complaint against Topics Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. District Court (California) over Topics’ documentary film: “Forks: Bitten by Twilight.” Summit is the producer and distributor of the Twilight series of films (Twilight, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon), based on the Twilight series of books by author Stephanie Meyer. Summit . . . [more]

The “future of law” is the theme of the current issue of Law Practice Magazine. It has an amazing article by Merrilyn Astin Tarlton titled “Figuring Out Your Place In The Race.”

When it comes to wisdom and insights on innovation and the future of law practice, few, if any, know and see more than my friend Merrilyn. This article in a must read for any managing partner or lawyer that wants to figure out what their firm needs to do to innovate and succeed in the practice of law.

In the article Merrilyn says “Frankly, let’s just say . . . [more]

There’s an interesting little post on Tim Bray’s blog, Ongoing, entitled “The Listening Engine.” Bray, one of the bloggers I’ve been following for years now, is the Canadian software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded Open Text Corporation and who is now the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems. He’s thoughtful, sensible.

In The Listening Engine he puzzles over how it is that RSS and Twitter are resources that some people simply don’t make use of:

When I first discovered the magic of RSS, I expected that it would sweep the entire online population, including everyone’s kids,