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]

HeinOnline is now offering an add-on subscription for archival Canadian and Australian legislation with the following scope:

Acts of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1901-2008

Acts of the Parliament of Canada, 1792-2007

We are in the process of subscribing so I have not been able to test the feature of being able to search across the full text of all Acts or to narrow the search to a specific year or just the Tables or Tables of Contents. Presumably it is also browsable.

With this content, and with the likely future content of other Canadian legislative material being . . . [more]

With the new BC Supreme Court Family and Civil Rules scheduled to come into force on July 1st, many firms are now scrambling to ensure they have the most up-to-date versions available. On May 5th an Order in Council came into effect which introduced a series of new amendments to the new rules. A number of local colleagues have said that getting a consolidated version of the rules that included the May 5th OIC has been difficult.

Speaking with our legislative friends at Quickscribe, they do have a fully consolidated version. Given the demand out here in the . . . [more]

on Slaw.ca: As a first test of iPad ereader apps, @conniecrosby tries out the Kobo and iBooks apps

Yesterday, May 25, 2010 Sack Goldblatt launched a class proceeding against Thomson Reuters Corporation and Thomson Reuters Canada Limited on behalf of a class of Canadian lawyers and law firms. The Statement of Claim claims that Thomson Reuters breaches copyright by making available original lawyer created legal documents for fee or subscription without permission from, or compensation to, the authors of the documents.

The representative plaintiff is Lorne Waldman, a leading immigration and refugee lawyer, whose work for Maher Arar has allegedly been copied by Thomson Reuters through its “Litigator” service. Litigator is a fee and subscription-based database for lawyer-created . . . [more]

Its online. Its free. Its Canadian. With so many good points in its favour without even talking about it, why am I posting? One of the things we try to do at Slaw is let people know what is out there in the information market. Some of us got a chance to see the quiet launch of this new tool at the CALL/ACBD/MichALL conference earlier this month in Windsor. For those who missed it, Irwin Law says:

We are very pleased to announce the launch of the Canadian Online Legal Dictionary, a dictionary of legal words and phrases. This

. . . [more]

The Canadian government introduced two important new bills yesterday. Bill C-29 amends PIPEDA – I’ll leave commentary on that to David Fraser.

Bill C-28 is the “Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act” or FISA. It is essentially the same as the “Electronic Commerce Protection Act” that was proposed previously. Here is Industry Canada’s news release, and the bill itself.

It targets the sending of what we would typically call spam, or unwanted commercial email, as well as spyware and phishing.

From the news release:

The proposed FISA is intended to deter the most damaging and deceptive forms of . . . [more]

Back in the winter, we unveiled the new features that Thomson / West’s boffins have been dreaming up to soup up Westlaw for a Google-impatient generation.

A few notes from Eagan. . . . [more]

I had occasion recently to take a look at Canadian Technology & IP Law, a blog put out by Stikeman Elliott. Their IP practice area page says the blog is new, but I was surprised to see that it’s been in existence since March of 2008: in all the time between then and now there have been a total of 40 posts, which is an average of something less than one entry every two weeks. There have been bursts of activity, from time to time; but dry spells have persisted as well, right up to the present: one . . . [more]

How can we reduce our workloads, and do the more interesting knowledge work? In his April 15th presentation “The Nature of Knowledge Work” Keith D. Swenson, VP of R & D for Fujistu America defined knowledge work as:

• Non-repeated
• Unpredictable
• Emergent
• Robust in the face of variable conditions

Presumably, then, all other work done by knowledge workers is information work. It is work that is repeated, predictable, routine or otherwise fairly straight-forward.

This is not a new consideration. We have been good at ensuring the repetitive or predictable work is given to people at more junior levels so . . . [more]

Chief Law Librarian, Schulich School of Law