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]

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]

The U.S. Federal Judiciary launched a radical redesign of its website recently.

As part of the redesign, it even created its own YouTube channel.

Other law-themed YouTube channels I have come across include:

• euTube (European Union)
• ICLR Channel (Incorporated Council of Law Reporting – publisher of the Law Reports in the UK)
• Law Library of Congress
• Courthouse Libraries BC
• HeinOnline

Those are just a few examples of what is out there. . . . [more]

The CALL/ACBD/MichALL law library conference currently underway in Windsor, Ontario, has had lots of useful sessions, as previously mentioned here on SLAW by Shaunna Mireau.

A busy schedule at the conference, combined with outrageously expensive wireless Internet access at the Caesars Windsor conference hotel, has prevented “live” blogging but I hope to post some entries shortly on lessons learned.

In sharing a panel session of free Internet legal research with Connie Crosby and two American law library colleagues, I learned about and briefly perused Connie Crosby’s new book called Effective Blogging for Libraries available from Neal-Schuman so wanted to . . . [more]

The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History has announced its 2010 Publishing Programme. According to an announcement published in the 2009 Annual Reports and available on their website at osgoodesociety.ca, this year the Society will publish four new works:

1. Work on Trial: Canadian Labour Law Struggles
edited by Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker and published for the Osgoode Society by Irwin Law. $45 incl GST.

2. A History of the British Columbia Court of Appeal
by Christopher Moore and published for the Osgoode Society by the University of British Columbia Press. $45 incl GST.

3. Viscount Haldane: Wicked . . . [more]

I have my fingers and toes crossed that an Apple Store in Michigan can hook me up with a shiny new iPad tomorrow. I am flying through Detroit on my way to the CALL/MichALL 2010 Conference in Windsor. An iPad is an early birthday present since an e-reader has been on my must have list for a while. Now that I can acquire an e-reader on steroids, I can’t wait any longer. Canadians have to wait for the iPad release, and since I can’t reserve over the phone, or online without a US mailing address, I just have to make . . . [more]

I decided I needed to educate myself a little when I saw Paul Lomio’s post (April 26, 2010) on Legal Research Plus: “What If Law Journal Citations Included Digital Object Identifiers? A Snapshot of Major Law Journals“. The post referenced an article by Benjamin J. Keele, abstracted (March 18, 2010) on SSRN: “What If Law Journal Citations Included Digital Object Identifiers? A Snapshot of Major Law Journals“.

The abstract began in a way which made me skeptical:

Prevailing citation practice in law journals is to use uniform resource locators (URLs) when citing electronic sources. Digital object

. . . [more]

Huge nod to Sarah Glassmeyer of Valparaiso for producing the elegant graphic below which charts the rise of the three mega legal publishers.

I find it odd that the commentators on this graphic haven’t pointed out the magic date late in the 1990s when the United States ceased to have its own legal publishing industry, all of the three majors having fallen to foreign ownership.

I might quibble about the inclusion of Brad Hildebrandt and David Baker’s businesses when acquired by Thomson. And what does Elite have to do with legal publishing. They are all businesses providing technology products and . . . [more]

In a story from Reuters, A Professor Ishikawa has created a scanner that can process hundreds of pages a minute. Using off-the shelf equipment, it takes 500 photos a second and calculates the curves of the pages, with the net effect that a book can be scanned as someone flips through it. Video here. As the story says,

While the technology has the potential to take paper books into the digital age, it remains to be how publishers will react to people scanning their books while just flipping through them.

On that note, it is worth mentioning that India . . . [more]