The EU privacy directive (1995 version – I gather that it is being revised, though I don’t know on what timetable) provides that member countries may not release personal information outside the EU unless the recipients are bound by equivalent safeguards for privacy.

While the US has a ‘safe harbor’ agreement with the EU about criteria for judging when the protections are equivalent, Canada does not. On the other hand, we have a generally applicable privacy law (PIPEDA) and some provincial equivalents, plus personal health information laws in most provinces. Are they enough to permit the personal information to come . . . [more]

We are pleased indeed to announce that a number of new columnists are joining Slaw.

Paula Black is a legal business development and branding consultant and coach based in Miami, Florida, and has recently been recognized by Managing Partner Magazine as a leading legal marketing expert. She is also the author of three “Little Black Books” on legal marketing and a blog, In Black and White.

Catherine Sanders Reach  has recently become the Director, Law Practice Management and Technology for the Chicago Bar Association. Before that she was the Director at the American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Resource Center . . . [more]

You’ll know from our announcement a couple of weeks ago that Slaw is in the running for best legal blog (legal technology category) in the ABA Journal Blawg 100 event. Seems we’re doing well in the voting but could use a last minute flurry to get us to the top. So if you’re minded to vote for Slaw but haven’t got around to it yet, this would be a good time to nip on over to the ABA site, register to vote, and cast your ballot for us in the Legal Technology category. It only takes a few seconds, and . . . [more]

‘Tis the season for law firms (and no doubt others) to send out season’s greetings by email, most often accompanied by the usual wordy and sometimes bilingual notices that the content of the email may be confidential, privileged and subject to diverse prohibitions that we are more or less politely admonished to comply with.

Here’s a typical, though polite, version (French omitted):

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The contents of this electronic mail message are confidential and strictly reserved for the sole use of its intended recipients. This message may contain information protected by the solicitor-client privilege. If you receive this message in

We read from time to time that Internet defamation is worse than that in other media because of its global reach and persistence over time. Thus the Ontario Court of Appeal in Barrick v Lopehandia 2004 CanLII 12938 issued an injunction against further defamation, in part because of the Internet’s character as “potentially a medium of virtually limitless international defamation” (the Court quoted Matthew Collins, The Law of Defamation and the Internet.) The court (by majority) also increased fivefold the damages awarded at trial, for similar reasons.

Recently the British Columbia Supreme Court granted ex parte injunctions against publication . . . [more]

We’re proud to say that Slaw has been selected as one of the 5th Annual ABA Journal Blawg 100. The kind words describing Slaw run as follows:

“Slaw is to law what Slate is to popular culture,” law blogger Robert Ambrogi writes. “It is an online magazine with a diverse array of writers and perspectives covering a wide array of legal topics. It is always interesting, always smart and always insightful. It represents the best of what a legal blog—strike that—any blog can aspire to be.”

To be nominated is a real honour. But there’s another stage to things: . . . [more]

After six-and-a-half years of daily publication, it’s become time for Slaw to accept sponsorship. As our body of past posts gets ever larger—a shade under 8,000 at the moment—and as the site becomes ever more developed, expenses rise. And because continual development is the watchword on the web, keeping Slaw relevant and responsive will mean financial costs as we work to stay abreast of the changes in technology.

So shortly after this post goes up, you’ll see the banners from those businesses who have agreed to help us keep Slaw going—and improving. Click on them to explore the products they . . . [more]

We’re very pleased indeed to announce that Colin Lachance and Joan Rataic-Lang have joined our roster of columnists.

Colin Lachance is the newly appointed President and CEO of CanLII. A lawyer by training, his career before CanLII was largely focused on communications law and policy. Following a few years in the marketing and government relations ends of the telecommunications industry, Colin started part-time studies towards an LL.M. at the University of Ottawa. As he puts it, to his “surprise and delight,” grad school opened him up to very different possibilities and ultimately a career change that brought him to CanLII. . . . [more]

I’m pleased to announce that Tamir Israel has joined Slaw as a regular blogger.

Tamir is staff lawyer with the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, where he conducts research and advocacy on various digital rights-related topics. The issues that concern him at CIPPIC include online privacy and anonymity, net neutrality, intellectual property, intermediary liability, spam, e-commerce, and consumer protection generally. Tamir also lectures on Internet regulation matters at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies.

Please welcome Tamir to the company of Slawyers. . . . [more]

The British Columbia Supreme Court has recently given judgment for Century 21 Real Estate company against a company (affiliated with Rogers Communications) that scraped real estate listing information from the Century 21 sites and repackaged it on its own site: Century 21 v Rogers Communications 2011 BC 1196 .

The court thoroughly reviewed US and Canadian law on the topic and recited a number of factors that might support a finding that a ‘browsewrap’ contract (i.e. one that did not depend on any active assent to its terms, but that operated by mere use of the web site) would be . . . [more]

When you next visit the website, you’ll see a few changes on Slaw. We’ve spruced up the site a little, mostly around the top banner, and we’ve made the recent new features on Slaw a bit more prominent by giving them menu icons at the very top. TalkLaw/ParLoi, MLB-Slaw Case Summaries, and SlawTips have already been introduced here — indeed, SlawTips is already venerable by web standards and has a healthy following of its own. But Noted on Slaw is brand new.

When Delicious got sold, it broke the right-column feature called Slaw Linkblog, where a number of . . . [more]

We tend to get requests at Slaw to publish notices of upcoming events of interest to the legal profession. And often we’ll come across such planned events in the course of checking out the news of the day. This use of Slaw for announcements is somewhat haphazard, though — and an entry about an event soon disappears off the main page. So to see if we can improve our reporting of upcoming events, we’ve launched TalkLaw/ParLoi. (You can get to it via either http://talklaw.slaw.ca or http://talklaw.ca.)

TalkLaw/ParLoi is essentially a cluster of Google calendars for various Canadian cities where . . . [more]