World Cup 2010 - Some Legal Aspects

Aspiring authors with an interest in digital self-publishing would be wise to review this June 3rd article from the Wall Street Journal: ‘Vanity’ Press Goes Digital. One of the big factors driving the viability of self-publication is this month’s changed revenue split with Authors by Amazon – rising from 35% to 70% for e-books priced from $2.99 to $9.99.

The article breaks down a lot of the economics involved, especially for authors with a smaller fan base:

“Some people will be tempted by the 70% royalty at Amazon,” Mr. Nash says. “If they already have a loyal fan base,

. . . [more]

Monday’s release of the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in Canberra splendidly elevates Graham Greenleaf to membership in the Order of Australia (General Division). See the Commonwealth Gazette No. S 84, Monday, 14 June 2010

The official announcement cites that it is: “For service to the law through the development of free electronic access to legal information, and as a leader in the protection of privacy.”

Since we neglected to recognize Austlii’s first place showing in the Australia and New Zealand Internet Best Practice Awards, sponsored by auDA and InternetNZ, the Internet domain name administrators for Australia and New . . . [more]

The algorithm for generating CanLII keywords sure spits out some gems. Take this real CanLII keyword string, for example:

• underwear — negligence — wearing blue acid washed jeans — defence — lawyer

How could one not link through to figure out what kind of negligence case could involve a pair of blue acid wash jeans? The fact that the word “underwear” comes before “negligence” makes this list of keywords even better. Could it be that negligence is now part of the “law of underwear”?

Here are some other goodies:

• lifejacket — flip flops — cordless — daughter — bed
• alibi

. . . [more]

Since I’m just back from France I thought it might be fun to point to one of the few government sponsored videos (entitled Crepes) that actually uses humour to get across a point about the necessity for interjurisdictional co-operation in the handling of accident benefits.

It comes from an excellent French blog, Precisement.org.

Les différentes voies de la communication juridique de l’Union européenne
Une histoire de crêpes
Ou la nécessité de coordination des sécurités sociales en Europe exposée en vidéo

It’s all about the need to carry your social security card on holiday. The EU Video . . . [more]

I am a regular user of the services and collection of the Alberta Government Library. The library organization has changed significantly over the years from embedded department libraries to a centralized model under the service branch of the government. The “significant change” trend is continuing in 2010.

There was a library group email list announcement recently that confirmed earlier rumours that three of seven branches (or sites as they are referred to) are closing as of October 1, 2010. Given that this consolidation will have a direct (likely negative) impact on my ability to gather information for my clients, . . . [more]

Rian — the word means “path” in Irish — is the new National Portal for Ireland. The portal aggregates the contents of the digital repositories of seven Irish universities. A search for [law] turns up 312 results, ranging in dates and topics, for example, from a 2007 article “Alternative Sanctions and Social Norms in International Law: The Case of Abu Ghraib” to an article from 1872 “On the practicability of codifying English law, with a specimen code of the law of evidence.”

You can, of course, order search results by date, relevance, item type, and so on. . . . [more]

On May 25th CLA Executive Council put forward two resolutions, to postpone elections (considered an unconstitutional but necessary move) and to operate on a zero-based balanced budget going forward. I have heard that, to balance the budget, it will mean closing down some or all divisions and special interest groups. These resolutions were voted on at the AGM on Saturday, June 5th.

Like most law librarians in this country, I am unfortunately not a member of the Canadian Library Association (CLA). Some of my colleagues, however, have been members of its CASLIS division for specialized libraries (as opposed . . . [more]

The Global Centre for Information and Communication Technologies in Parliament, a partnership initiative of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, has released a considerable World e-Parliament 2010 report. (Aussi disponible en français.) According to the executive summary [PDF]:

The Report presents the latest data on the use and availability of systems, applications, hardware, and other tools in [134] parliaments around the world, based on the global survey conducted by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament in 2009.

. . . The Report highlights two critical issues – communication with citizens

. . . [more]

CNA releases 2009-2010 FOI Audit. Federal government not doing well. Exceptional Valedictory address.

That Google. They have a lot of stuff, including some US Patent and Trademark office material.

The following USPTO patent products are available for free download.

Grant images
Grant full text
Grant bibliographic data
Published applications
Assignments
Maintenance fee events
USPTO Red Book
Classification information

Google must have been delivering patents for some time through its Patents beta site since their database contains “over 7 million patents”. I don’t recall hearing about this and would have remained ignorant but for Alex Horns post about the bulk data news from Tech Daily Dose.

As the Google folks say about . . . [more]

I’ve talked on Slaw before about IBM’s Many Eyes, the project from their research lab that lets you upload data and turn it into visualizations of various kinds. Now they’ve developed a version called Many Bills, a way of searching through the bills presented to the U.S. Congress (during 2009) to find and present topics buried within these lengthy documents.

A search for [copyright] for example yields 61 bills and 106 sections within them that touch on copyright. Each bill is presented as a narrow stripe (50 to a very wide page, in this case), with the sections . . . [more]