Lawrence Lessig has put out a call to make a donation to support Creative Commons. From his request:

About 8 years ago, a bunch of us started thinking about how we might make the current system of copyright work better. We wanted a voluntary system that would give people a simple way to signal the freedom they wanted their creative work to carry, so their work would say legally what most took the Net to say implicitly — share this. The result was Creative Commons, born December 16, 2002.

None of us imagined then just how quickly the idea

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 hate not knowing everything. I am fairly certain that this is not a unique position among law librarians. Fortunately, people in my firm share their knowledge with me. Thanks to Field Law partner Janice Jong, I learned about Lawday.ca.

Lawday is a newsletter that has been in circulation by email for over three years. The site offers legal news from North America as well as directories of leading lawyers, arbitrators and legal experts. The site also offers aggregation of law firm newsletters every Thursday – called Law Bulletins on their site.

From the About page:

LawDay reaches

Back in October I reported that the Special Libraries Association was gearing up for a vote to change its name. The vote was closed yesterday, and the results have just been released. Members voted 3225 to 2071 to keep the SLA Name.

Today’s full SLA press release is reprinted below the fold: . . . [more]

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has just released a report on Academic Law Library Statistics 2007-2008.

Among the highlights (all dollars are in US currency):

• Out of 113 ARL university libraries, 74 responded to this survey
• Law libraries reported median values of 345,935 volumes held and 8,033 gross volumes added. Also, these libraries employed the full-time equivalent of 2,129 staff members in the fiscal year 2007–2008
• Responding libraries reported total expenditures of $215,630,657 … materials expenditures made up the largest portion of the total, with 47% of aggregated expenses falling under a materials-related category
• Law libraries reported a

Is law important?

Clearly the print media don’t think so. Look at the way in which they carve up our world — and you’ll look in vain for a category or a main topic-head, let alone a section, for law or for its fuzzy cousin, justice.

The home page menus for the big newspapers offer you a collection of stories on politics, the economy, sports, style, arts, science, cars, weather, and sometimes education and health. But never law. To look at how six highly respected English language newspapers (the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the New York Times, the . . . [more]

When I closed an old Google account over the weekend, it appears that I inadvertently deleted the Custom Google Search of Canadian law firms that I had created (and that I understand is used a fair bit by researchers).

I have created a new Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms, now at a new URL of:

http://www.tinyurl.com/canadianlawfirms

Click here to see a sample search result on the phrase “fiduciary duties.”

The new site is free of ads and has more Canadian law firms included (now there are 51 or the larger law firms from across the country). I also . . . [more]

You couldn’t buy this kind of advertisement — at least, I hope you couldn’t. Check out the pic on the front page of the newly revamped U.S. Open Government Initiative | The White House. Just in case they change it, and the earnest young man at the keyboard is no longer there when you go to look, I’ve put a screenshot below.

Apple is becoming so mainstream I may have to switch to Linux to keep my smug sense of computer specialness.

Oh, and while you’re on the White House site, look around. It’s a little different from what . . . [more]

The Cross-Border Biotech Blog had a very blawg-y week this week with three posts on legal issues affecting the biotech world, thanks in part to my lovely and talented legal writer/spouse/editor/CMO Audrey Fried-Grushcow.

I kicked things off with a post on three need-to-know Canadian patent decisions that impact pharma, biotech and generics companies, pulling together three Ogilvy Renault bulletins into one executive-summary-level overview of key recent developments.

Audrey picked up the legal theme with a post noting oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court for a case under the False Claims Act (FCA) in which amici curiae PhRMA and . . . [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

I don’t know how long this has been going on, but some courts are sending judgments to CanLII with hyperlinked tables of contents. Plain old text TOCs are nothing new, of course: long — long, long. . . — judgments pretty much demand them. But courts seem to have discovered that, because they create and submit their judgments to CanLII in MS Word format, it’s fairly easy to construct a hyperlinked table of contents.

A search for [table of contents] turns up recent “hot” TOCs from Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, and Ontario.

This is, of course, . . . [more]

A notice to the profession on the Ontario Court of Appeal website reads:

Electronic Delivery of Copies of Reasons for Judgment

On January 1, 2010 the court will modernize its procedure for delivery of copies of its reasons for judgment to counsel and litigants.

Rather than requiring litigants or counsel to attend at the registry office of the court to obtain a paper copy of the decision, the court will send a PDF copy of the signed judgment by e-mail to those counsel and litigants who have provided an e-mail address. Copies will continue to be available for those parties