When we think of intellectual property potection, we usually think of patents, trade-marks and copyright. Less top of mind are registered industrial designs. They protect unique, non-utilitarian design aspects of an article. While they are thought of as a patent – indeed, in the US they are called design patents and are contained within the utility patent database – they are really more akin to trade-marks and copyright.

Read more in my Free Press article on my blog, or on the Free Press site. (For some reason it hasn’t made the Canoe Tech page yet this week.) . . . [more]

I recently helped the Toronto Association of Law Libraries (TALL) set up a Facebook group. I’ve long suspected it: law librarians *love* Facebook. It is a place where we can talk to each other one-on-one, share photos about our personal lives, play word games, and join groups of interest. Almost immediately after creating the TALL group, we had over 30 people sign up by word of mouth. Official word about the group went out a few weeks ago, and we now have more than double that signed up.

Some of our thinking behind creating the group:

• members were asking

About eight months ago I spent a Friday Fillip on the TED video of Maira Kalman, an illustrator and writer perhaps best known for her New Yorker covers. Kalman also does a monthly column in the New York Times called “And the Pursuit of Happiness,” where she tells a simple tale with drawn text and lovely illustrations. In April her column was “May It Please the Court,” telling of her visit to the Supreme Court of the United States, her interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her reflections on a number of women important in American history.

Take . . . [more]

We’re going to be upgrading WordPress starting at 5:00 Eastern today. Fellow Slawyers: Please refrain from logging in or trying to post during that time. … I will update this post when the site is back up and operational.

Many thanks for your patience.

Steve

Update: Car Game On! … at least tentatively. Any issues, please relay to Simon or myself. . . . [more]

At the end of a hectic week like yours, it’s time to slow things down. Way down. Way, way down. As only film can. Slow motion has been around since the early 1900s, when it was invented by an Austrian physicist and priest August Musger, who used mirrors (but no smoke). (Incidental law note: Musger patented his invention in 1904; but in 1914 failed to pay the fees and lost his patent.)

How is slow motion done? It’s easy to say but harder to understand, because the illusion of motion derived from a series of still images results from . . . [more]

There’s a great post on the Law Librarian Blog this morning, entitled Who are we anyway? In it, the author muses on the role of librarians in bridging the gap between users and technology, and challenges us to think about whether we’ve reached the point where librarians MUST be tech-competent and strategic users of technology in order to properly function in the profession.

I would have thought we passed this point some years ago. From helping students figure out the photocopier to participating in the design of portals and document repositories, librarians have had a key role in making . . . [more]

Here’s some information on the upcoming Westpac 2009 Conference, to be held this October 8-10 in Victoria. The Program is shaping up pretty well, with confirmed presentations from Professors John Davis and Ted McDorman, a tour of the Legislative Library, and a very interesting excursion to visit and learn about the Cowichan Tribes. We also plan a tour of the newly renovated Diana M. Priestly Law Library. I have to say, the conference hotel, designed by Aurthur Erickson, should be a pleasure. especially if you can afford to a studio (at conference rates, they will be considerably more . . . [more]

That’s the title of my Free Press article for this week. It talks about the new IOC rules for athlete blogging for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. In essence, the IOC has amended its rules to allow limited blogging, and have taken the position that bloggers are not journalists. In essence, they don’t want them to be journalists, as that might run counter to the rights they sell to traditional media outlets.

In checking Slaw this morning to see if anyone else has mentioned this subject, I noticed Connie Crosby’s post from last summer about athlete blogging. She pointed out that . . . [more]

Happy Bloomsday, from all of us at Slaw!

Oddly, there’s no plan to tweet the whole of Ulysses in 140 character chunks. And neither is there a #bloomsday hashtag. Twitter fail? To get things started, here are the first 140 characters of that fabulous novel:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,
bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
A yellow dressingg

You can find the rest of the book online (Joyce’s books are in the public domain now in Canada) at Finnegan’s Web. . . . [more]

Here are the ins and outs of biotech this past week:

As far as Merck was concerned, Xenon Pharmaceuticals was in, with a new deal that has Merck providing R&D funding for new small-molecule cardiovascular drugs and getting an option on any output. Neuromed was out, with Merck pulling out of a collaboration looking for NCE’s targeting N-type calcium channels.

Online medical resources are in, with new offerings from the Canadian Medical Association for patients with diabetes and an information upgrade from the Ontario Hospital Association at myhospitalcare.ca. But the Ontario Health Quality Council’s 2009 Annual . . . [more]

When I was young and lived for a while in Washington D.C. I had a revelation about penguins. The zoo there had — may still have — a glass-walled penguin area: you saw the comic creatures shuffle like hobbled waiters, and watched as they dived into the pool — where you saw them magically turn into bullets, streamlined torpedoes of muscle that could dart and swerve and race with astonishing grace. I suspect that someone from Festo, the source of today’s fillip, must have had a similar early experience, because that company is all about understanding and reproducing the . . . [more]

…flu, that is.

The WHO has declared a pandemic. Most of the increasing numbers of sufferers are to be found in the UK, Australia, Japan and Chile. (See the BBC story, which has a video of WHO’s Dr. Chan making the declaration.)

It is the first time in 40 years that a flu pandemic has been declared. Unlike the one in 1968, however, which killed over a million people, this outbreak seems to result mostly in mild illness. A pandemic is a description of the widespread nature of an illness and not an indication, necessarily, of the severity of . . . [more]