Yesterday the judge in the Mayor Larry O’Brien trial, Associate Chief Justice Douglas Cunningham, ruled that reporters may report live from the courtroom via their electronic devices. This is, I believe, the first time that such live blogging has been permitted in a Canadian trial. The ruling was made on a motion by the Ottawa Citizen. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the same journal is live tweeting the procedings.

Glen McGregor, a reporter for the Citizen, is tweeting the trial at http://www.twitter.com/obrientrial and already has a number of tweets up from a brief first day. If you could use some . . . [more]

The NYT blog is reporting an odd intervention by the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries expressing concern about the long-term impact of the Google settlement on research libraries and asking United States District Court Judge Denny Chin to exercise “vigorous oversight” over a class action settlement between Google, authors and publishers.

The groups did not oppose the settlement, but asked for continuing oversight, to ensure that the prices Google charges for subscriptions to its digital library aren’t artificially high because of a lack of competition. . . . [more]

Professor Larry Lessig’s recent book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, has been released under a Creative Commons license and is available as a free download from Bloomsbury Academic. You can, as well, purchase a hardback version and an e-book version.

The book is divided into the following chapters (a more detailed TOC is available on the book’s website):

Chapter 1: The Cultures of our Past
Chapter 2: Cultures of our Future
Chapter 3: RO [Read-only], Extended
Chapter 4: RW [Read/Write], Revived
Chapter 5: Cultures Compared
Chapter 6: Two Economies: Commercial and Sharing . . . [more]

Find a niche with growth potential
Organize information to make it useful
The internet is a distribution channel — not a product
Turn words into maths
Separate the signal from the noise
Computers can’t do everything
Treat content like patented material
Print’s not dead, it just needs online help

Rules that wouldn’t have been recognized by the distinguished figure below:

They’re the distilled wisdom in a well-researched piece entitled Westlaw rises to legal publishing fame by selling free information – St. Paul company outprofits Gannett, McGraw Hill, New York Times

And it started here: . . . [more]

Gosh I know I’ve a lot of space on my Ipod, but do I really need to be able to check the wisdom of Bryan Garner all the time, everywhere. Our friends in Eagan MN announced the release of most recent 8th edition of Black’s Law Dictionary Application for the iPhone. It’s a unique publication – as far as I know, the first serious legal research tool released for that platform. And a big plus for Bryan, who got a great tip yesterday from William Safire in the NYT.

While today’s FT lauds Thomson-West’s acumen in building a . . . [more]

The notice from Quicklaw about legislation that Shaunna just mentioned has been causing a fair bit of discussion in TALL‘s listserv. As a result, Louis Mirando, Chief Law Librarian at Osgoode Hall Law School has described the Ontario historical legislation digitizing project that is currently underway. With a slight bit of editing, here is Louis’ message, reprinted with permission:

most recent efforts have been undertaken as part of, and are funded by, the “Ontario Digitization Initiative” (ODI) of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL). As its pilot ODI project, OCUL is digitizing Ontario legislative materials from the

This teaser from the National Law Journal Web version caught my eye:

Are you interested in legal issues but shudder at the thought of wading through massive law review articles riddled with footnotes? A new Web site just might be the answer. Legalworkshop.org aims to bring content from some of the most prestigious law reviews in the nation to a wider audience by offering condensed version of articles translated from scholarly language into plain English, and at no cost.

This is a very interesting idea. First a new and free aggregated source for accessing peer reviewed legal research. Second a . . . [more]

We’ve mentioned the practice of having a web adjunct to conventional law journals. A collective was announced yesterday. I’ll let them speak for themselves:

Law Journals Band Together to Launch Web Magazine

The Legal Workshop Aims to Revitalize Legal Scholarship

STANFORD, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–A consortium of America’s most influential law reviews today launched The Legal Workshop, a free, online magazine featuring articles based on legal scholarship published in the print editions of seven participating law reviews: Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern Law Review, and University of Chicago

Some recent posts have advocated the idea that law school publishers should “stop publishing” law journals in print. Instead, the posts say, the publishers should direct their energy to “creating definitive versions of their journals in digital formats and making the law review articles readily accessible in online repositories”.

I agree with the conventional wisdom that the demise of print formats for law journals and law reports is an inevitability and that it will happen in the not too distant future. Acceptance by the legal community of “digital only law journals” combined with economic realities will ultimately produce that result. . . . [more]

Something with only a tangential relation to law, but squarely in the middle of our interest in online resources and libraries:

As of today all Canadians can log into the Canadian Cochrane Centre, part of “The Cochrane Collaboration,” and free of charge read abstracts in plain language of studies in medicine and health care — or, as the welcome page puts it:

…the best available evidence on which health treatments work, which ones don’t, and which may cause harm.

I have to say I’ve never encountered the Cochrane Library before and am basically ignorant about how it’s funded and . . . [more]

Here is a link to the settlement that Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced this morning to resolve a dispute about Matthew Bender’s subscription renewal practices. . . . [more]

The Ontario Ombudsman — office of, one presumes — is now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Ont_Ombudsman

It’ll be interesting to see how this organization uses the tool. The ratio of @ private replies to useful content is running just a trifle high for my taste. There’s got to be a way to exclude these cryptic messages from a stream. . . . [more]