Have a Blackberry or iPhone? Need to see a case or note it up?

Westlaw Canada now has a Mobile browser.

www.wireless.westlaw.com or www.wireless.westlaw.com/Keycite

Password required of course. . . . [more]

There has been a lot of controversy lately over the concept of the “three strikes law”, where if a rights holder advises an ISP that a customer has downloaded copyrighted material, the ISP must send a notice. If that happens 3 times, then the ISP must cut off that person’s internet access. Its proposal in Britain is not being well received, and rightly so. See, for example, openrightsgroup.org.

My take on the subject is in my weekly newspaper article, which I can’t publish here (ironically) because of my agreement with the newspaper but you can read it on my . . . [more]

Like many lawyers, I am not really a numbers person. Despite its fundamental importance, financial analysis of our growing firm is something that I have found challenging. Combined with a busy practice and demands from many places for precious time, it has been a project that has sat on the back burner for too long.

I have many articles printed out from the BC Law Society, Ontario’s practice PRO, CLE BC and Law Practice magazine – often written by Dave Bilinsky – on how to analyze and manage law firm finances effectively to maximize profit and reduce risk. . . . [more]

Doubtless there have been other stories like this, but multiple headlines on the same day start me wondering whether after the North American economic earthquake settles, we won’t have very different local and community outreach for legal services and legal information: . . . [more]

The Vancouver Sun is reporting that the current government plans to introduce a Bill in Parliament tomorrow that will require internet service providers to report suspected child pornography on sites they host or that are linked from sites they host: Ottawa aims to strengthen Internet child porn laws.

The text is not available, but when considered along with Bill C-47, the government appears to be singling out the telecommunications industry to take on additional law enforcement duties. We’ve generally been technology neutral in our criminal laws, but there seems to be a trend emerging to focus on what’s online . . . [more]

As a counterpart to Simon’s post below on applying modern technology to 16th century information, I thought I would offer Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense Technology described as “a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.”

Doesn’t sound like much?

Watch the video of his explanations here from the TED Conferences page. I mean watch it now (a colleague just made me aware of it). It is one of the most breathtaking things I have seen and was completely shocked that I was not . . . [more]

One of the glories of the internet and the digital era is their ability to bring the past to us in a lively fashion. And the latest gift from the ages is the Shakespeare Quartos — the early, perhaps the earliest, published volumes of the Bard’s plays. (A quarto is a book size, coming from the fact that the large page on which the text was printed got folded four times before binding. Wikipedia is good on the topic.)

The British Library has teamed up with other institutions holding quartos to make all of them available for your perusal online. . . . [more]

While the BBC reported this weekend on Pods and Blogs on the extraordinary growth of Tweetminster, the place where real life and politics tweet, in Ottawa it’s a different story. NDP member Charlie Angus wants Canadian MPs to declare Twitter off-limits, because of some personal abuse in the House last night. Here’s the Globe’s commentary and yesterday’s story.

As someone who has sat through enough late night House sittings, at which not all Honourable Members were entirely sober, I can report that abuse that doesn’t quite get reported in Hansard is not unknown within Canadian democracy. I’m not . . . [more]

Each year at this time, the Toronto office of Blakes sends out a challenge to other Bay Street firms to organize food drives/fundraising on behalf of the Daily Bread Food Bank. Last year’s challenge raised an incredible $271,645. Can the firms do even better this year? Who will get bragging rights for the most food and dollars raised?

The law firm challenge runs Monday, November 23 to Friday, December 11.

From the Blakes memo that went to firms:

Daily Bread supplies 13 million pounds of emergency food. Last year, there was over 1 million food bank

Steve just posted about the Kindle coming to Canada – certainly a noteworthy and overdue event. (I’m going to hold out for something that displays colour.)

Some other noteworthy things from the last few days (at least for those of us in the tech/legal/privacy world) include:

Ontario Privacy Commissioner report on the Smart Grid and privacy

Federal privacy Commissioner reports critical of Fintrac and the No Fly list

A new socialnomics video about the ROI of social media.

Twitterfeeds from two Canadian law tech conferences that gave a good flavour of the speaker messages.

Court rulings in the Apple . . . [more]

It’s the 6-inch International version (not the DX), so we still can claim to be capital of the digital third world. But my new Kindle was just ordered via Amazon.com (not .ca) and shipped to north of the border! ($311.06 USD, yes we’re getting hosed! see photo below)

The news stories are already across the Canadian media, but to cite a few: Gillian Shaw, National Post, Reuters

Full credit for the lovely photo below to Engadget.

. . . [more]

CNet reports that a couple of US universities have decided against using the Kindle as a replacement for textbooks, on accessibility grounds:

“The big disappointment was learning that the Kindle DX is not accessible to the blind,” Ken Frazier, the University of Wisconsin-Madison director of libraries, said in a statement.

Said the National Federation of the Blind:

[The] “menus of the device are not accessible to the blind…making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle