The CanLII blog announced that their new legislation system is now live. It is not a Friday.

The main improvements introduced by this new approach are:

* Versions of statutes and regulations reflect real changes;
* Legislative updates are carried out on a weekly basis;
* Versions’ dates correspond to legislative changes, such as entry into force, amendment or repeal;
* You can search a legislative text as it was legally binding on a particular date in the past. Historical coverage is approximately five years;
* You can compare two different versions of a particular document;
* You can

Current CALL President Anne Matthewman announced (via CALL-L) the election results for the 2009-2011 Executive Board on Wednesday. Those were:

• President: Rosalie Fox
• Past President: Anne Matthewman
• Vice-President: Cynthia Murphy
• Treasurer: Sandra Wilkins
• Secretary: Ann Marie Melvie
• Member-at-Large: Susan Jones
• Member-at-Large: Gregory Wurzer

A big Slaw congratulations to each of you serving on the new Board! . . . [more]

As of April 1, 2009, Alberta’s minimum wage will increase to $8.80 per hour from the current $8.40.

What about the rest of the country? The Alberta government news release backgrounder gives all the details, including where provinces fall in the minimum wage comparison after July 1, 2009.

Alberta’s minimum wage as of April 1, 2009

1st Ontario* $9.50
2nd Alberta** $8.80
3rd(tied) Saskatchewan $8.60
3rd(tied) Nova Scotia** $8.60
5th (tied) Newfoundland and Labrador $8.50
5th (tied) Quebec $8.50
5th (tied) Manitoba $8.50
8th (tied) British Columbia $8.00
8th (tied) Prince Edward Island $8.00
10th New Brunswick $7.75

Alberta’s minimum . . . [more]

Looks like CLB Media is pulling the plug on their Canadian Lawyer Associates magazine. This from an email I received yesterday:

“The Spring edition of Canadian Lawyer Associates magazine, now in circulation and available digitally at www.canadianlawyermag.com/associates, will be the last printed version of the publication. Market conditions have prevented this very well-received publication from gaining the advertising traction it needed to sustain its publishing schedule.

We wish to thank all those in the legal community who supported the publication through advertising and by supplying story ideas and editorial content which allowed us to publish and distribute five excellent issues

The Bank of Canada has just announced it has dropped its target for the overnight rate by 50 basis points to 0.5%. You may recall back in December that we started on this descent into unprecedented lows known as the “race to zero”. The goal is to help the Canadian economy recover from the current recession. According to Bank of Canada’s news release: . . . [more]

The vogue for several years in the major commercial legal publishing houses has been to offer data through “global platforms” that give the customer a single point of access to all of their proprietary and licensed content. A global platform enables the publisher to “leverage” its proprietary content from one country by selling it in another. In addition to expanding the scope of the product offering, a global platform offers an opportunity for online revenue growth by transactional and subscription sales of international content in the various domestic markets.

It all sounds like a great idea, especially in the boardrooms . . . [more]

The ITU today released a major survey on global access to information, comparing developments in information and communication technologies.

A lot of food for thought.

Based on ITU estimates, 23 out of 100 inhabitants globally used the Internet at the end of 2008. But penetration levels in the developing countries remain low. Africa with 5 per cent penetration is lagging behind.

The global trend shows significant growth in mobiles: Six in 10 people across the globe now use mobile phones, particularly in developing countries. By the end of 2008, there were an estimated 4.1 billion subscribers globally. In . . . [more]

While I suspect that most Slaw readers have Google as their home page or their default search engine, young lawyers need to be reminded that every search engine has its limits, and that different engines will generate different results. The page you really need may be invisible.

While over the years I’ve migrated engines – anyone remember hotbot or Northernlight ? – my current alternate tends to be Microsoft’s live.com. It’s a trailing third behind Google and Yahoo.

News today of major changes:

a Best Match feature resulting from a souped-up algorithm

– for more analysis see an excellent . . . [more]

Yesterday’s New York Times article Copyright Challenge for Sites that Excerpt by Brian Stelter explores the boundaries as to what is acceptable with regard to excerpting from news stories by other websites, and what is causing news publishers to become uncomfortable. When is it acceptable to quote the majority of an article in a blog post? Is it okay to take a whole RSS feed from a news source (which they are freely supplying), and republish it on a website with additional advertising?

It seems that it all depends on who is doing the republishing. Prominent free news aggregator Google . . . [more]

Over two years ago, Simon Chester noted,

75 percent of all traffic on the Internet is due to file sharing, with 59 percent of that file sharing attributed to people swapping video files. Music tracks account for 33 percent of the file-sharing traffic. E-mail, it turns out, accounts for just 9 percent of the total traffic.

Well it turns out that all that file sharing activity is not without risk.

Tiversa, a Pennsylvania-based company that monitors peer-to-peer file sharing, revealed this week that they found a transfer of military information from a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., to . . . [more]

Thanks to a number of helpful suggestions from Slawyers, I’ve made some changes to LawTop — the Canadian law-related news aggregator I blogged about on Tuesday.

Most important, I’ve added another layer of manipulation, using Yahoo! Pipes to filter for Canadian content. Canadian news sources report on law-related stories from around the globe, but my true aim was to keep the focus as much as possible on Canadian events or stories directly related to Canada. This isn’t simply possible, given the lack of a sophisticated context identifier (Google’s “location” filter in the advanced news search isn’t really useful in this . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada recently published a special edition of its Bulletin of Proceedings called Statistics 1998 to 2008.

The statistics are broken down into 5 categories:

• Cases Filed: the number of complete applications for leave to appeal and notices of appeal as of right filed by litigants with the Court’s Registry each year
• Applications for Leave Submitted: number of leave applications submitted to panels of the Court for decision, the number of leave applications granted and the percentage granted of the total submitted
• Appeals Heard: number of appeals heard each year and the number of hearing days