The international NGO Human Rights Watch recently published a report on the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics that states that the “corporate sponsors of the Olympics risk lasting damage to their brands if they do not live up to their professed standards of corporate social responsibility by speaking out about the deteriorating human rights situation in China.”

The report targets the 12 highest-level corporate benefactors of the Beijing Games, known as the TOP sponsors (“The Olympic Partner”): Atos Origin, Coca-Cola, General Electric (GE), Manulife (parent company of John Hancock), Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, Lenovo, McDonald’s, Omega (Swatch Group), Panasonic (Matsushita), Samsung, . . . [more]

Ron Jones of Law Librarian Blog reminds us about the 4th edition of the bibliography of online Canadian federal government databases released way back in January and containing some 488 datatbases available online. . . . [more]

Sunny Woan, a JD student at Santa Clara University, recently published a paper in the California Western Law Review called “The Blogosphere: Past, Present, and Future”. The article is a nice look through the history of blogs, their role in journalism, and some of the legal issues they bring up, along with a small discussion of how blogs are treated elsewhere around the world.

It’s a quick read and refers in the footnotes to some articles that look very interesting.

The article is not up at the CWLR site, but is available from SSRN. . . . [more]

I have been thinking about books recently while considering our firm’s own print and online collection. Paul Emond’s column last week on The Future of Academic Legal Publishing addresses head-on the challenges and opportunities facing publishers of law-related books (and casebooks). In my September 2007 SLAW posting titled Digital Law Books in Canada, I suggested that we have perhaps reached a (positive) tipping point on the availability of digital law-related books with (very) roughly 10% of the major Canadian legal treatises being available in digital format. Since that time, I have had the opportunity to consider and debate this . . . [more]

Olivier Charbonneau, bibliothécaire professionnel et chercheur à l’Université Concordia, and blogger behind the excellent CultureLibre.ca, posts about a petition started by Le député provincial de Mercier à Montréal, Daniel Turp, aiming to persuade ICANN to grant Quebec the top level domain designation “dot qc.”

Apparently the Deputy discovered that the semi-autonomous regions of Catalan and Greenland have their own dot suffixes.

The full list of top level domains is available on the IANA site. .GL, Greenland’s code is listed as a “country code”; while .CAT is said to be “sponsored” and “Reserved for the Catalan linguistic and cultural . . . [more]

John Ruggie, appointed UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on business and human rights has recently released his report, “Protect, Respect and Remedy: a Framework for Business and Human Rights.” [PDF]

From the summary:

Responding to the invitation by the Human Rights Council for the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises to submit his views and recommendations for its consideration, this report presents a conceptual and policy framework to anchor the business and human rights debate, and to help guide all relevant actors. The framework comprises

I’ve happened on a paper published last year by Graham Greenleaf, Philip Chung and Andrew Mowbray, Co-Directors of AustLII & WorldLII, “Emerging Global Networks for Free Access to Law: WorldLII’s Strategies 2002-2005” on SCRIPT-ed – A Journal of Law, Technology & Society.

SCRIPT-ed is an online journal out of the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh, and is associated with the AHRC Centre for Research in Intellectual Property and Technology Law there. . . . [more]

In recognition of National Library Week, Entertainment Weekly has posted a photo gallery of movie scenes featuring libraries.

Thanks to Nicole Engard for first spotting it.

 Enjoy! . . . [more]

I am a total sucker for this kind of stuff.

This week is National Library Week for our American friends.

Many commercial database vendors and aggregators are marking the occasion by providing temporary free access to their products.

For example:

• Greenwood Publishing is providing free access to database products as diverse as Praeger Security International Online, Reader’s Advisor Online and ARBAOnline (thousand of reviews of reference works). You have to register first.
• Gale is allowing free access to a long list of popular and academic collections like Literature Criticism Online, Science Resource Center, and the Gale Virtual Reference Library

The New York Times has a story on the copyright infringement lawsuit by J.K. Rowling against the proposed publisher of a Harry Potter Lexicon, created by Steven Jan Vander Ark, a librarian. Unable to resist some of the stereotypes associated with librarians (e.g. the very opening line: “Shhh! The librarian at the heart of…”), the Times reports that Rowling got emotional enough to cry during testimony Monday, and Vander Ark wept yesterday.

And in case you’re interested, it comes from the horse’s mouth that the “unlocking spell” Alohomora! does not come from Aloha, as Vander Ark had surmised, but rather . . . [more]

Boing Boing gives us Carl Malmud’s report that U.S. free access sites Justia and Public.Resources.Org have received take-down letters from the Oregon Legislative Counsel in connection with their publishing of Oregon’s laws. Apparently West Publishing, which has also reproduced Oregon’s laws without a licence from the state, will not receive a similar demand.

I know that Canada and Ontario claim Crown copyright in our laws but explicitly permit copying if the material is reproduced accurately and that copyright is acknowledged. . . . [more]

Like all of us, I sometime lament the state of legal writing, particularly of the academic sort. It is often so laden with detail (each one meticulously footnoted) that the reader can’t find the main point. But I think I may finally have stumbled on the culprit.

Philip Parker, a business professor, has developed a computer program that crawls through the internet gathering information from publicly available sources, and puts the information into book form. He then prints the books on demand and sells them through amazon.com. So far he’s generated more than 200,000 books.

Not surprisingly, the reviews . . . [more]