On January 28, 2010, the Law Commission of Ontario and IP Osgoode held a Symposium on electronic medical records. The Symposium brought together experts from law, academia, health and other areas as part of the consultation that Professor Pina D’Agostino is carrying out in her project on the intersection of IP, ethics and privacy issues arising from electronic medical records. Professor D’Agostino is an Osgoode LCO Scholar in Residence and she is carrying out her project in association with the LCO. All these issues were discussed, with some passion in some cases, but so was a more fundamental question about . . . [more]

The Real-time web has been a popular topic in recent times as we all try to figure out how it is changing, and will continue to change our work lives. I’ve recently started Yammering here at Dalhousie; no not prattling on endlessly, but using the service Yammer or enterprise microblogging. In simple terms think Twitter, without the 140 character limit and limited to your workplace or business email domain. The product has been around for a couple of years and has been referred to in passing here at Slaw previously. In the short time that I’ve used Yammer at . . . [more]

I learned recently that the University of Alberta has been digitizing microfilm or microfiche from the collection of Canadiana.org and placing the scans on the Internet Archive. (There’s a PowerPoint presentation online that will give you some sense of U of A’s digitization projects.) At present a search for [contributor:(canadiana.org)] turns up over 22,000 items. Of these, just under 800 are tagged “law” in some respect.

There is no attempt to catalog these items in any useful way, which means a researcher must rely on searching — not the easiest thing on the Internet Archive. (For example, . . . [more]

.♫ Copycat, copycat, copycat
copy copy copy everyone else….♫

Lyrics by Dolores O’Riordan and music by Noel Hogan and Dolores O’Riordan, recorded by The Cranberries.

Anyone who places content on the web should be concerned with detecting the unauthorized copying of their content. Certainly anyone with a blog would not want others taking their original content without their permission. This actually happened to my own blog just recently: www.thoughtfullaw.com. In my case it was simply someone who was unaware of the rules around copyright.

But there was a case in Victoria British Columbia where a law firm . . . [more]

For those who don’t know of it, Arts & Letters Daily is an aggregator par excelllence for links to information and links of all kinds. Another is the Voice of the Shuttle. VoS describes itself as a “website for humanities research”.

At present, the first reference in the AL&D “Articles of Note” column is to a new article about the Peter Principle and studies that have been done since the book The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong came out in 1969.

The A&LD summary, taken from the paragraph in the article under the heading “Pervasively inept” is:  . . . [more]

Dominic Jaar has an interesting article in the droit-inc blog (en français) suggesting that a printed document may have less legal impact than the electronic original, because the printout does not reproduce all the information in the original, notably not the metadata. And these days, pretty well all documents start in electronic form, in a word processing program of some sort. Who has a typewriter any more?

This is a particular issue in Quebec because of the terms of the Act to provide a legal framework for information technologies — Loi concernant le cadre juridique des technologies de l’information, . . . [more]

I’ve joked previously that the Google crowdsource traffic feature was a free ambulance chaser application.

A British firm has developed a iPhone application specifically intended to document all the details necessary for future litigation, the iPhone Car Incident Assistant application (iCIA). The Times Online reports:

It appears ambulance chasing has gone digital after Bott & Company, a law firm in Manchester that specialises in personal injury claims, has developed an application for the iPhone that prompts people involved in an accident to record insurance and witness details, take multiple photographs, store GPS information and click through to a

Many North American law firms have developed their intranet portals using Microsoft SharePoint 2007 software (soon to be released in a new 2010 version).

There have been numerous posts on SLAW discussing SharePoint; in addition, Microsoft has an industry page for law firms that provides some useful links to case studies.

There are several reasons why many law firms are using SharePoint:

– Content aggregator/organizer: SharePoint can be used to create a true intranet portal, being the interface – via a web browser – between the user an a variety of data sources such as your document,

At issue in the GasTOPS trial was the development and sale of a software program for the computerized maintain of jet engines and aircraft. The benefits of a Computerized Maintenance Management System are that it reduces maintenance mistakes while at the same time reducing labour costs.

When I fly on an airplane or ride on a train I am encouraged to buy my ticket online. I recently was at my family doctors office and instead of a thick file of handwritten notes covering 35 years of attendances, test results and prescriptions, she brought up my file on a monitor in . . . [more]

♫ And gazing down from yonder,
On a world of blue and green,
He’ll say with eyes of wonder,
I have seen, i have seen,
My eyes have seen…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Chris de Burgh.

A lawyer friend of mine told me about his recent use of his new Sony Reader in Court. No, this wasn’t to read books while waiting to speak in Chambers! He is using it in direct and cross-examination in court and I thought it would be of interest to the readers on Slaw. So with no further ado, here it is in . . . [more]

Last week Leslie Ellen Harris correctly pointed out in her Slaw post Using Flickr Photos that we should not assume content available on the web is freely available without copyright. She gave photos on Flickr as the example.

One thing I love about Flickr, however, is that it allows those of us who upload photos to designate Creative Commons licensing as an alternative. When I am looking for images for blog posts or presentations, I will often use the advanced search on Flickr to look for images available under Creative Commons (especially for commercial use)–scroll down on the advanced search . . . [more]