RIA Novosti sets up agency providing legal information. Here is the Press Release

MOSCOW, December 3 – The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti has established a law agency to cover new developments taking place in Russia’s legal system, a RIA Novosti deputy editor-in-chief said on Wednesday.

The Agency for Legal and Judicial Information (APSI), set up jointly with Russia’s Supreme Court, Constitutional Court and Supreme Court of Arbitration, is due to begin its work in the near future, Maxim Filimonov said.

The new agency aims to provide objective information on the activity of the courts in an effort to . . . [more]

♬It’s work, the most important thing is work..♬

Words and Music by Lou Reed and John Cale, recorded by John Cale.

I was part of an online email dialogue today on Tablet PC’s. I have long been an admirer of these devices that are closer to a pad of paper than any other computing platform. I liked the idea that you could take out a stylus and start drawing, writing, clicking – rather than being limited to using a keyboard. I felt that this was a positive step in the development of the portable computer. . . . [more]

Tip of the hat to Ian Kerr, who points us to Michael Giest’s latest project:

Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law

It’s a film on the significance of copyright as an issue in Canada. It features a wide range of Canadian voices – artists like Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art; writers like award winning science fiction author Karl Schroeder; musicians like Wide Mouth Mason’s Safwan Javed; business people like Nettwerk Record’s Terry McBride, Lulu.com’s Bob Young, and Skylink Technologies’ Philip Tsui; government appointees like Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart and Ian . . . [more]

Thanks to Random Musings from the Desert, I discovered the Typealyzer. It tells you what Myers-Briggs type you are, based upon analysis of your blog content. Needless to say, I pointed it immediately at SLAW. I figured that it would have some trouble coming up with a typology, given the number of personalities that contribute to the blog. Disappointingly, it came up with a fairly valid identification in a short while. SLAW is:

ISTJ – The Duty Fulfillers

I had occasion to cancel a credit card and get a new one recently, which made me look at and think about credit card numbers. I suppose that I’d always thought of them as a more or less random string of integers, maximizing the number of such strings that would be available to banks etc. (10 X 10 X 10 etc. for each integer place…) and making it just that bit more difficult for criminals to suss out a number.

Turns out I couldn’t be more wrong: credit card (and bank card) numbers are highly structured entities and only make . . . [more]

Looks like Twitter is cutting outbound SMS messaging:

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the

I want to do a little bragging today (on behalf of a number of people). Yesterday (November 24, 2008), the Attorney General introduced in the Legislature reforms to family law, including on division of pensions on marital breakdown. Now, this was a project the LCO undertook a year ago. . . . [more]

♫ So you want to be a leader
See how high you can climb
If you want to be a leader
It takes guts and sweat and time

Can you take it on your shoulders
Be proud and strong and free
Can you look them in the eye and say
Come this way follow me…♫

Words and music by ImprovAndy

Winston Churchill once said: “We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.” These are dark days and the gloom is growing darker. Economies are faltering world-wide, industries and corporations are looking for bailouts . . . [more]

From national politics let’s turn our sights to the local variety: Bob LeDrew over at Flacklife has picked up the newsdurhamregion.com story of Oshawa City Councillor Robert Lutczyk who claims to hold the copyright on the name “University of Ontario Institute of Technology” among other names. Thing is, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology already existed before he supposedly copyrighted the name in 2005. . . . [more]

This sounds like part of a law school exam question: The (US) government files an indictment against an outlaw biker gang and seeks forfeiture of its assets. Among those assets are a registered trade-mark for the name of the gang and a distinctive logo. The services with which the trade-mark is associated include, in code, operating biker gang (actually “ASSOCIATION SERVICES, NAMELY, PROMOTING THE INTERESTS OF PERSONS INTERESTED IN THE RECREATION OF RIDING MOTORCYCLES“). The prosecutor says that once the mark is forfeited, police can seize bikers’ colours as trade-mark infringement. Discuss.

I’m not going to give away . . . [more]

♬ What kind of blog am I…? ♬

Thanks to librarians Judith A. Siess and Karen Sawatzky, I learned about Typealizer, an online service that offers to type your blog along Myers-Briggs (i.e. Jungian) lines. Unsurprisingly, Slaw comes out as a “Duty Fulfiller,” or an ISTJ (inroverted sensing thinking judging) type.

The two paragraph description of a duty fulfiller reads as follows:

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are . . . [more]

Google is in the process of hosting the archive of photographs owned by Life magazine, making them available via Google Images search. At the moment about 2 million photos are online, with another 8 million to come, some dating back to the 1860s and the birth of photography.

This has no direct relevance to law, of course, and so is off-topic for Slaw. But the publication of 10 million images from America’s past might be of general interest to our readers. As well, this move has Google entering the publishing field in a big way.

There’s a ton of stuff . . . [more]