A peer recently brought this image to my attention and it immediately caught my attention and spoke to me. The image is from an article entitled, “What will a World of Warcraft player look like in 2030?”. If, by some chance, you are not familiar with the World of Warcraft, suffice it to say that it is an internet gaming phenomena that has wasted countless hours and more than a few thousand dollars of tuition. The title of the image has been co-opted in various locations to “The future of gaming?” and I have further co-opted it here to . . . [more]

This dispatch arrives from WIRED:

Unix weenies everywhere will be partying like it’s 1234567890 this Friday.

If you needed confirmation that geeky web 2.0 social events have permeated every useful dimension of your existence, here it is. I see that Toronto is not organized yet (also check here), but Vancouver is.

I wonder if anyone will be able to tell us exactly when 0987654321 passed us by, and why we were not informed… . . . [more]

For a brief while, a long time ago, I played silly mid-off — which was probably the most foolish of all of the “silly-this” and “silly-that” things I’ve done. It’s a fielding position in cricket, and I’ve got a picture here to show you what the “silly” part is all about. My theory at the time was that I’d be so close to the batsman that there’d be no time at all to think about whether or not I wanted to apply my bare hands to a very hard and very swift ball: it’d simply be a case of rapid . . . [more]

Anyone who has been shy about launching a blog because of a worry about the tech side of things need worry no more. Posterous makes starting and maintaining a blog as easy as… well, as easy as email. (We have all mastered that, no?) All you need to do — and I mean “all” — is email anything (photo, video, MP3 file, other file) to post@posterous.com and there you are: you’re blogging. Talk about “greasing the skids of prolixity,” this is crazy easy.

The text of your email becomes the text of your post, photos are cropped and posted for . . . [more]

Congratulations to Doug Cornelius who has started the new blog Compliance Building. You may remember last October we mentioned he had moved from his real estate practice and knowledge management law firm work to take on the role of Chief Compliance Office for Beacon Capital Partners, LLC, a real estate private equity firm. On the “About” page, he explains the new blog: “I focus on compliance issues applicable to real estate private equity firms.”

I love the dual meaning of the blog title! Very clever, even if it does stray from his “spaces” blog name theme. . . . [more]

Courtesy of the Northern European law firm Roschier comes news of this most alarming decision from the Finnish Supreme Court: running an ice fishing competition without a lottery licence.

Supreme Court Rules on Lottery Offence in Ice Fishing Competition Case

The Supreme Court ruled on 30 December 2008 that an ice fishing competition can constitute a lottery in accordance with the Lotteries Act. […]

[T]he participants were entitled a prize of monetary value for each fish caught based on the weight of that single fish. The value of this prize rose substantially along with the weight classes, but at the

For those interested in the legal challenges posed by the “war on terror”, this Friday’s broadcast of “The Agenda”, on TVOntario, will have an interview with my good friend Ben Wittes, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of the recent book Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror. Well worth a look, especially for those who comfort themselves with the idea that maximal protection for human rights entails no trade-offs in terms of security – or vice versa. . . . [more]

I just got back from giving a presentation on IP law to a group of accountants, in which I gave a high level view of various forms of intellectual property. I have been asked to give this presentation several times over the years, so thought it might be worthwhile to share the slides.
ip-slides . . . [more]

♫ You are the sunshine of my life, yeah,
Thats why Ill always stay around,
You are the apple of my eye,
Forever you’ll stay in my heart…♫

Words and Music by Stevie Wonder.

The legal proceedings of Apple Inc. v. Psystar Corporation are very interesting. Psystar has been sued by Apple for selling computers with the Mac OS X operating system installed, called Open Macs. Apple, for its part, is alleging copyright, trademark and other claims against Psystar in relation to Psystar’s use of Apple’s operating system. Psystar originally alleged violation of federal and state anti-trust laws. In this . . . [more]

Today we’re headed south — but only just. The U.S. Government is a prolific educator and propagandist, and until the internet came along film was perhaps the premier medium for reaching the public with your message. Now, in a more-or-less-happy marriage of the “tubes” and the flicks, internet liberator Carl Malamud has made a whole whack load (524 at last count) of U.S government movies available via PublicResource.org’s channel on YouTube.

A visit to the site automatically starts one of my all-time faves, “Duck and Cover,” because I was there, ducking and covering exactly like the . . . [more]

The report by Richard Florida and Roger Martin, Ontario in the Creative Age, is available in PDF on the site of the Martin Prosperity Institute (… hate these tendentious names… ). I’m never very stirred — or shaken — by this sort of institute report, but this time there’s real merit in the thing, I think: rather than scrape the rust off the Victorian cogs and shafts, we should invest in what we now know will be tomorrow’s “normal” technology and skill sets. The report acknowledges the social upheaval that must accompany the shift away from routine labour to . . . [more]

My good friend and fellow geek Catherine Sanders Reach, Director of the American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Resource Center (as an aside – there is tons of great info for lawyers on legal technology at the LTRC) sent me this hilarious cartoon by David Mills from Courtoons on How lawyers use technology to make things easier . . . [more]