Regular readers of this column (thank you) will recognize copyright reform is a common interest of mine, especially as such reform might lead to greater public access to research. Still, I only took up the copyright torch after a very loose consensus – among researchers, publishers, librarians and funders – around open access’ scientific value began to emerge. Such consensus has been called the iron law of copyright reform. Could such reform address, I dared to hope, reduce such impediments to open access as publishers dragging their heels, while holding on to subscription arrangements, even as they introduced rampant price . . . [more]

[Une version française suit]

On January 13, 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada issued its landmark decision in Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island, 2000 SCC 1 (CanLII), [2000] 1 SCR 3, a case significant for its impact on minority language educational rights in Canada. This decision was also the Court’s first to adopt the Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law, a pivotal innovation introduced in 1999 by the Canadian Citation Committee. Neutral citations have since become a cornerstone of Canadian legal practice, providing a standardized, vendor-neutral method for referring to judicial decisions, as reported many times here . . . [more]

Whether or not there is truth in the rumours that upstart, Harvey, has been keen to acquire the much-admired vLex, it was interesting to read the analysis by Isha Marathe, of Legaltech News, on the topic, as reported via legal market heroes, House of Butter. The HoB report concludes, “If Harvey wants to make true on the third item in its tech offerings—workflow automation; an AI assistant, and legal research—it’s going to have to find the data. The story of Harvey and vLex underscores the market barriers to a startup becoming a substantial legal research mainstay . . . [more]

The week of October 7th this year was quite something for Artificial Intelligence (AI). It was the object of two consecutive Nobel Prizes, awarded just days apart. The first, in Physics, went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton (a British Canadian) for laying the foundations of machine learning. The second in Chemistry, won by Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker, was for utilizing AI to predict millions of intricate protein structures that are key to understanding molecular interactions. In stark contrast to this double triumph are some 20 copyright infringement suits filed against OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, . . . [more]

From the reassuring distance of not relying significantly on the professional information industry to pay my creditors, I can permit myself to comment, on or off message at whim, on the requirement, for some others, to remain on it, and always promote the party line. The obvious result, if this is the case, is that much of what we read and hear is likely to be public relations nonsense, and even lies. I would also admit that, particularly over the period during which I have been writing and pondering on law publishing, and reflecting on the totality of . . . [more]

In July of last year, Canada’s three research-funding agencies set out to improve public and academic access to the studies they sponsor. Open access to research and scholarship is proving to be the digital era’s great gift to science, and all the more so, following open access’ contributions to Covid vaccine development during the pandemic. The plan for Canada’s Tri-Agency, as it is known, was to review and revise its Open Access Policy by identifying “the key features of an effective, comprehensive, sustainable and equitable immediate OA Policy for peer-reviewed articles, and the incentives and supports required for the Policy’s . . . [more]

The news, from a distance, that the assets of Canada’s Irwin Law publishing business have been sold is nevertheless interesting and, one might hope, a positive step that will allow its portfolio to be developed in concert with that of the asset acquirer, the renowned University of Toronto Press. It is also hoped that the vendors have the same sense of satisfaction as my fellow owners and I had, at Dunedin Academic Press, having recently passed its assets to Liverpool University Press, and that the customer bases of and suppliers to both Irwin and UTP are the beneficiaries of . . . [more]

The Canadian Open Access Legal (COAL) Citation Guide/Guide canadien de la référence juridique en accès libre (RJAL) is now available: https://canlii.ca/t/7nc6q Over the course of two years, law librarians from across Canada worked together to create the COAL-RJAL Guide. The English version of the Guide is now freely available and hosted on CanLII (2024 CanLIIDocs 830), and the French version is in progress. The Guide is intended to be used throughout the legal field and incorporates feedback contributed by reviewers from Canadian courts, law firms, law journals, law societies, and law schools. The COAL-RJAL . . . [more]

Karnov Group, the legal and professional information business based in Sweden, looked somewhat courageous and heroic when around the end of 2021, in one swoop, it agreed to buy significant legal publishing assets both from Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer in Spain and France. Now with offices in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Spain and Portugal, Karnov Group employs more than 1,200 people. The Spanish-French conquest helped to turn Karnov from a Nordic entity to a leading European one and, perhaps, set the scene for expansion of Napoleonic scale; that may yet be the plan. After a short time, however, . . . [more]

Aspen Publishing, until the end of 2021, was part of Wolters Kluwer’s Legal & Regulatory information publishing business unit. Around that time, it was sold, for $88m, to Transom Capital Group, a private equity firm. A mere two years later, it has been moved on again, this time to UWorld, a US-based online learning business, which was established in 2003, by a medical doctor. UWorld’s existing learning resources and methods are offered in certain undergraduate, graduate and professional environments, such as accounting, finance, medical, pharmacy and nursing, as well as for some aspects of US legal training. In . . . [more]

“This is the largest theft in the United States, period.” Such is the judgment of author and scriptwriter Justine Bateman who has complained to the US Copyright Office that the AI industry has scraped her work, much as it has everything else, having exhausted Wikipedia and Reddit it is moving on YouTube transcripts and Google docs. This is what it takes to assemble the trillions of words needed to expand the training of ever-more-powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). As a result, Bateman’s complaint has become a common charge. Authors (notably Sarah Silverman and John Grisham), publishers (Universal Music . . . [more]

For those of us raised in Canada and who studied law here, it can be easy to forget that the way we practise law is very… Canadian. While we’re all aware that there are substantive differences between Canadian law and the law of other jurisdictions, it’s much easier to forget that the practice of law varies just as much from nation to nation. There’s more than one way to do almost anything, and the Canadian legal system is founded on a very specific set of choices, norms, and traditions. Upon arriving in Canada from her native Australia, and despite her . . . [more]