Larry Lessig’s book “The Future of Ideas” is now free to download under Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial license.

Published in 2001 by Random House, the book addresses IP and the impact on it of the internet. You can read an excerpt here.

Lessig’s other books are also available free under a Creative Commons license:

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Creativity (Penguin Press, 2004).

Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 (Basic Books, 2006).

[via Digital Koans] . . . [more]

Although many online repositories of books have been mentioned here, one that has not is the Universial Digital Library. This collection, created by a group including Carnegie Mellon university, the Library of Alexandria, and a number of universities from China and India, already has over a million titles (of which 360,000 are in English), and claims it will grow to 10 million within 10 years.

You can browse the collection by title, author, year, language, or subject. Browsing the “Law” collection yields 24,772 titles. An advanced search function is also available.

Now if only someone would invent the perfect . . . [more]

I don’t think Slaw has mentioned the International Judicial Monitor, an “international law resource for judiciaries, justice sector professionals, and the rule of law community around the world.” Published, or refreshed, every two months or so, this issue of the Monitor has a feature piece on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and notes on a dozen judicial developments in as many countries. There’s also a useful page of “international resources.”

The Monitor is published by the American Society of International Law in Washington, D.C. . . . [more]

I often consult WestlaweCarswell for electronic access to the Index to Canadian Legal Literature. I use the search template designed for that purpose. Usually I rely on general keyword searches. But today, since my research related to a specific piece of legislation, I thought I would use the “Legislation” field. Unfortunately, my various search term combinations did not easily yield the results I sought.

Here is a hypothetical example to illustrate my point:

If I entered Criminal Code 123 into the “Legislation” field, I got one hit, which actually related to s. 123 of another act and a different section

Three or four times in the last week I have had discussions with various people on the issue of the versions of copies of court cases that are provided to the court in a book of authorities – are you required to provide a photocopy of the case from an official (or unofficial) print version of the case or is it acceptable to provide a printout of an online version from one of the commercial databases or from CanLII?

A decade or more ago – when online versions of judgments did not always format well or may not have . . . [more]

The Adbusters suit to get the major TV outlets to run its ads entered a new phase yesterday. The British Columbia Supreme Court began hearing argument on two motions, one to add the CBC as a party and the other by CanWest to have the case dismissed, presumably as showing no cause of action (the details are scarce, as usual when a lawsuit is involved). Adbusters has tried and failed to get the major networks to run its ads for Buy Nothing Day or those attacking the fast food and forestry industries. It seems–as I said, the details are scarce–that . . . [more]

On Dec. 26 the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) received a legislative requirement (see here, choose HR 2764, and browse for National Institues of Health, then see sec. 218) to make all of its publicly-funded research results available online for free. A summary of the event with comments and links to reactions was published by Peter Suber in his SPARC Open Access Newsletter on Jan. 2, and, here is a preprint of an article on the news, which is to appear in an upcoming Information Today. . . . [more]

The Malaysian government has told a Christian publication, Herald, that it may not use the word Allah to refer to the Christian God. The story is carried by the BBC and, later, the New York Times, though I first heard about it on the sterling Language Log.

I’ve not been able to get my hands on the wording of the prohibition. It’s been put variously by the news sources, which typically say that the rule is that non-Muslims may not use the word Allah; but this, as Language Log pointed out, doesn’t seem right: the Herald would likely . . . [more]

The American Asssociation of Law Libraries sent an email to members today asking the following question: What “extinct” book, research tool, database, etc., do you miss from an earlier time (include the year) and why?

They will publish the results in their Spectrum magazine and I will report back here on their results. Since I assume most of their responses will be based on American law-related resources, I thought I would throw the question out here specifically for any Canadian responses. What “extinct” book, research tool, database, etc., do you miss from an earlier time (include the year) and why? . . . [more]

The site Resourceshelf mentioned yesterday that the Columbia University website has posted videos of the presentations from an October 2007 international conference on Human Rights Archives and Documentation: Meeting the Needs of Research, Teaching, Advocacy, and Justice.

Scholars, human rights activists, legal advocates, librarians, and archivists from all over the world attended the conference to explore issues around how documentation of human rights situations is created, archived, preserved, accessed, and utilized.

The conference marked the formal opening of the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research at Columbia University Libraries. The Center is the official repository for the archives . . . [more]

The U.K. organization Privacy International, together with the U.S.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, have published their 2007 privacy rankings for European and some other countries. In their judgement Canada has in the last year slipped from the best category (“significant protections and safeguards”) to the middle category (“some safeguards but weakened protection”). They provide a detailed analysis that forms the basis for this judgement.

Clearly intended to shock, the report now puts the United States into the worst possible category, that of an “endemic surveillance society.”

This report is the result of serious analysis and deserves careful attention. My only . . . [more]

Looking for an English translation of the Portuguese lyrics of a song (Oiça lá ó senhor vinho) by my current favourite singer, Mariza, I decided to take Google up on its offer to “translate this page.” Now the translation of plain text is hard enough, but the translation of song lyrics is really tough, and Google got maybe a C-minus on its effort. But I noticed that mousing over a sentence caused a popup that showed me the original language and invited me to offer a better translation. This is cool.

You see it below in a . . . [more]