It’s May 2-4, even though it’s only May 21, a holiday in Canada. So things will be pretty quiet here on Slaw today. Friends to the south or overseas, talk among yourselves. We’ll be back bright and early tomorrow.

Where I am — Toronto — the holiday is generally known as May 2-4, because: it was created to celebrate the birthday of Queen Victoria, which was May 24th; and “a two-four” is slang for a case of 24 bottles of beer, i.e. that which often accompanies BBQ festivities on this first warm-weather (we hope) holiday in Canada. However, unlike other . . . [more]

A private member’s bill, Bill 96, the Electronic Commerce Amendment Act, 2012, was introduced on May 17, 2012, to amend Ontario’s Electronic Commerce Act.

The bill does three things:

i) It repeals the exclusion of land transfers from the E-Commerce Act (paragraph 31(1)(d) of the Act, s. 2 of the Bill).

ii) It requires for a land transfer that is electronically signed, that

in light of all the circumstances, including any relevant agreement, the purpose for which the document is created and the time the electronic signature is made,

(a) the electronic signature is reliable for the

We have discussed on Slaw the mandatory disclosure of information from Facebook pages in civil litigation, and the disclosure of FB passwords to prospective employers. I do not believe that we have discussed the disclosure of information from FB in the course of a criminal investigation.

A German court has recently ordered disclosure of the content of private messages and pictures from a suspect’s FB pages. A write-up of the case appears in International Law Office.

Is this just another search warrant for a computer? Would courts where you are have any difficulty with an application for such a warrant? . . . [more]

Slaw is mighty pleased to announce that Kim Nayyer will be rejoining us as a regular blogger.

Kim is currently a law librarian at the University of Victoria, where she focuses on collection development, instruction, and digital community engagement. She is also a non-practicing member of the Bars of Alberta (1994) and Ontario (2004), and while a research lawyer at a small Edmonton firm in the mid-90s, she managed the library and helped build a knowledge management system. Kim was also a research lawyer in large firms in Calgary and Toronto and at the courts, in which settings she worked . . . [more]

Should you put a disclaimer on your re-tweets (or on your Twitter profile) that your retweeting does not necessarily mean your endorsement of the content of the message so distributed?

Here is an article suggesting that disclaimers are not a bad idea. Associated Press has recently warned its journalists about this, and suggested that a mere disclaimer may not be enough. The article goes into blogger endorsements under the recent FTC policy on that topic too.

Can readers of your retweet figure out when your ‘no comment’ is an ironic dismissal of the content, rather than a neutral retransmission? Would . . . [more]

Slaw is proud to let you know that Mitch Kowalski has joined our already great roster of regular bloggers. Mitch is a lawyer, a writer and an entrepreneur. He is the author of Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Law for the 21st Century just published by the American Bar Association, and holds a LL.B. and a M.A. in Political Science from the University of Western Ontario as well as a LL.M. from Osgoode Hall Law School. For much of his 20-year legal career, he practiced law with the Toronto office of Baker & McKenzie, before moving to Aylesworth LLP, which later became . . . [more]

There are five nationwide holidays in this country: Canada Day (July 1), Labour Day (1st Monday in September), Christmas Day (December 25), New Year’s Day (January 1)—and Good Friday, today (which is two days prior to Easter, which in turn falls, roughly speaking, on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the 21st of March).

There will likely be no new entries on Slaw today.

See you all on Monday—which is not a statutory holiday in any province or territory and not a holiday within the Canada Labour Code . . . though many federal government offices will . . . [more]

This week Slaw is going to feature a couple of entries each day by and about law students. Slaw contributor Adam Dodek has arranged with students from his courses on Professional Responsibility at Ottawa University Faculty of Law to let us publish five of their short essays. And Slawyer Dan Pinnington, whose day job has him, among other things, on the senior management team at LAWPRO Magazine, has kindly let us republish excerpts from the recent student edition of that publication.

You’ll easily recognize these special posts by the banner that will head them up:

And because there are perhaps . . . [more]

Here’s a good review of the law on shrink-wrap, click-through and ‘browse-wrap’ contracts . I expect the law of New York is much like the law in at least common law Canada on the topic. The comment is inspired by a recent dispute about Facebook’s ability to enforce its forum-selection clause. The author says that most lawyers would have thought that FB’s sign-up process was ‘bullet-proof’, but the court still made a thorough analysis of it.

The process required the person signing up to click on the terms of service to see them, In other words, the assent to those . . . [more]

Today’s a holiday throughout much of Canada today. In Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan it’s Family Day. In Prince Edward Island it’s Islander Day. And in Manitoba it’s Louis Riel Day. However, even in those provinces, folks who work for the federal government will be toiling today. It’s all very Canadian.

And it’s all by way of saying that things will be quieter than usual here on Slaw today.

See you tomorrow. Most of you. . . . [more]

Slaw is pleased to let you know that three new columnists have joined us. They’ll be coming on line over the course of the next months, in the order in which their brief bios appear here:

Kevin O’Keefe, as you’ll likely know, is the CEO and founder of LexBlog. He was a trial lawyer in Wisconsin for 17 years and remains a sustaining member of the the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, and he has served as a vice president of business development for Martindale-Hubbell. LexBlog is that mighty platform that enables thousands of lawyers in the US . . . [more]

The Paris court of appeals has decided that a suggested search query generated by the Google Suggest function defamed the company whose name was first entered into the search box. This feature works by displaying the most popular searches performed by other Google searchers associated with the text typed into the search box. So Google doesn’t decide what is displayed; its machines just count and show.

Turns out that one of the most popular associations with the name of the plaintiff company was ‘escroc’, which in French means crook or swindler.

Is this a kind of ‘crowd-sourced’ defamation? What can . . . [more]