A number of Facebook users in Quebec tried to begin a class action against FB for alleged infringements on their privacy. A Quebec court has now refused certification as a class action and dismissed the case: St Arnaud c. Facebook Inc. 2011 QCCS 1506.

One ground for dismissal was that FB users sign an agreement that all disputes must be adjudicated in Santa Clara County, California.

A more interesting element of the decision was that the ‘contract’ with FB was not a consumer contract within the meaning of Quebec law, since there was no payment and no obligation on . . . [more]

We have mentioned before the recent work of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law on online dispute resolution (ODR) and a colloquium held to review the potential future work of UNCITRAL on e-commerce issues.

ODR

The UNCITRAL Secretariat has produced a working paper for the meeting next month of the ODR Working Group. Working Paper 107 is a draft set of procedural rules that might apply to ODR processes. Along with it, you’ll find WP.106, the provisional agenda for that meeting.

Will this work? Is it likely to be useful? Or is it too high-level to provide real . . . [more]

One of the ways that we at Slaw stay in touch with our readers is through search engines’ reports on websites that refer to us. The fact that the internet has shrunk the world — or expanded my small part of it, which is the other way to look at it — continues to amaze me, as it did once again when I came across a reference to Slaw in a Bulgarian blog on media law, [Медийно право] [Нели Огнянова]. What caught their attention, I should mention, was the recent post by Dan Pinnington, The 2/3 Rule Will Make . . . [more]

The European Union has begun a public consultation on online authentication in the context of its review of its Electronic Signature Directive of 1999.

An early assertion in the press release is this: “difficulties in verifying people’s identities and signatures are a significant factor holding back the development of the EU’s online economy.”

Is this true, in your view or in your experience? How often is identification of the other party to a transaction, or authentication of an identity one already knows, a concern, compared to, for example, the solvency of the party, the quality of the goods offered, the . . . [more]

The European Union has been thinking about the disharmony of its consumer laws and the disincentive that this can pose to cross-border commerce, particularly e-commerce. This disincentive may be greater because the Rome Treaty requires that consumer disputes be resolved in the courts of the consumer’s residence according to the law of that place. B2C e-commerce among EU countries is not expanding along with domestic B2C e-commerce.

The EU has come up with a proposal to have a ‘28th law’ (in addition to the law of the 27 member states), being a common consumer law that could be opted into . . . [more]

Bruni v. Bruni, 2010 ONSC 6568 (CanLII), a recent decision of the Superior Court of Justice in a family matter, noted (literally, in a footnote (23)):

In recent years, the evidence in family trials typically includes reams of text messages between the parties, helpfully laying bare their true characters. Assessing credibility is not nearly as difficult as it was before the use of e-mails and text messages became prolific. Parties are not shy about splattering their spleens throughout cyberspace.

Is that your experience? Does a multiplicity of informal electronic communications help or hurt assessment of credibility? Is . . . [more]

People have expressed concern about behavioural advertising, in which advertisers watch what one does online in order to send out ads that are likely to appeal to the person watched. A number of big online services are now developing a ‘do not track’ command to allow their users to prevent their information from being collected for that purpose.

A more interesting, and more intrusive, usage of behavioural information collected online is by insurance companies that may decide whether someone is a good risk to insure based on that information. Fans of XXX’s double-cheese-and-bacon deep-dish pizzas may find themselves having a . . . [more]

This is just a reminder about our new sister site, SlawTips — tips.slaw.ca — launched last week.

It’s Tuesday so that means it’s a tech tip today. Research tip tomorrow, practice tip on Thursday. That’s how it goes. So go and take a look. . . . [more]

What are the pressing topics on which international law should be developed regarding electronic commerce? Are your clients running into difficulties, or areas of uncertainty, that could be resolved by a harmonized approach among our trading partners?

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) is asking these questions. UNCITRAL has been the source of much innovation in e-com law over the years, notably with its Model Law on Electronic Commerce (1996) [PDF] that is the basis of Canadian, American and much other law on that topic.

UNCITRAL is holding a colloquium in New York next month (Feb 14 . . . [more]

We’re proud to announce that Slaw is launching a new, sister site: SlawTips. You can find it at — you guessed it: tips.slaw.ca. (If you guessed slawtips.ca, no worries: that URL will get you to our tips as well.)

The notion is simplicity itself — which is kind of the idea. On SlawTips you’ll find brief, clear, useful nuggets of advice at the easy-going rate of one a day. In fact, it’s even simpler than that. You’ll get a tip about technology every Tuesday, a tip about research each Wednesday, and a tip about practice on Thursdays. That’s . . . [more]

From time to time I bug the good folks at Lexum about introducing paragraph level anchors into the court decisions they publish: it would be very handy indeed to be able to make a hyperlink that went right to a paragraph within a judgment. And, of course, this feature, like many others, is on the crowded Lexum/CanLII agenda, and will have to wait its turn.

But in the meanwhile, the New York Times has just released a new version of its paragraph level linking tool, Emphasis. There’s a good article, “Emphasis Update and Source,” by Michael Donohoe, that . . . [more]

Bruce Carton at Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch has honoured Slaw by picking it as one of his “10 most watched” blogs of 2010. He’s got a video of them all, which just so happens to start with you-know-which blog. Click on the image below to go to his post and the video.

We are proud to be in the company of the following great blogs:

1. Consumerist
2. Jonathan Turley
3. Legal Juice
4. Legal Satyricon
5. Lowering the Bar
6. Simple Justice
7. Slaw.ca
8. SPAM Notes
9. Texas Lawyer
10. THR, Esq.

Many thanks, Bruce. . . . [more]