The good thing is that your cellphone lets others know where you are. The bad thing is that your cellphone lets others know where you are — whether you want it to or not.

Every few seconds your cellphone checks in with either a relay tower or a GPS system, which is how it’s able to perform the wonders of geolocation on Google Maps or Yelp or whatever apps you use to tell you where you are and what’s available around you. Of course, all this checking in leaves electronic records with those who provide or manage the connections, records . . . [more]

The Utah Supreme Court this week held that electronic signatures gathered through a web site were valid signatures for the purpose of nominating a person to run for elected office: Anderson v Bell 2010 UT 47 June 22, 2010.

To run for governor in Utah, one needs a nomination document signed by one thousand people. The would-be candidate submitted a nomination form with a combination of hand-written and electronic signatures, the latter appearing on the form only as a list of typewritten names. The state election authority refused to accept the electronic signatures, thus reducing the number of signatures to . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled on the Conrad Black case in a decision released today.

Black had argued that the “right to honest services” was stretched to fit the crimes and was originally intended for public servants. They relied on Yates v. United States in seeking the verdict to be set aside when it is impossible to tell what ground a jury was selected when there are several grounds for conviction. The government’s positions was that the jury were given proper instruction regarding honest services fraud and the conviction should stand. The Court . . . [more]

The United States Supreme Court released its judgment in City Of Ontario, California, et al. v. Quon et al. today, deciding that when police officer Quon’s employers examined his pager records, they did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights, because although he had a reasonable expectation of privacy, as the jury determined the employer’s examination was for the legitimate, work-related purpose of deciding whether the current character limit in the contract with the provider was adequate.

An interesting excerpt from the judgment of the court, delivered by Kennedy J., which I have not had the time to digest:

The Court

. . . [more]

Monday’s release of the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in Canberra splendidly elevates Graham Greenleaf to membership in the Order of Australia (General Division). See the Commonwealth Gazette No. S 84, Monday, 14 June 2010

The official announcement cites that it is: “For service to the law through the development of free electronic access to legal information, and as a leader in the protection of privacy.”

Since we neglected to recognize Austlii’s first place showing in the Australia and New Zealand Internet Best Practice Awards, sponsored by auDA and InternetNZ, the Internet domain name administrators for Australia and New . . . [more]

Iceland’s venerable parliament, the Althing, has just passed a law that Wikileaks helped craft. The law creates the Modern Media Initiative and alters a whole set of legal duties and rights in order to encourage freedom of the press, transparency in government and corporate dealings, and reward with a prize akin to the Nobel Prize

. . . those who, through their actions in the past 12 months have most advanced humanity through courageous acts of free expression. It is envisaged that the prize would primarily be awarded to journalists, whistleblowers, human rights activists and publishers.

The aim is . . . [more]

♫ Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,
Under the shade of a coolibah tree.
He sang and he watched and waited ’til his billy boiled,
“You’ll come a-waltzing, Matilda, with me….♫

Words and music by: Banjo Paterson.

Professor John Zeleznikow, Laboratory of Decision Support and Dispute Management, School of Management and Information Systems, Victoria University, in a comment posted to the ODR and Consumers 2010 blog, alluded to a paper discussing the existing Online Family Dispute Resolution Service in Australia.

At the ODR Conference in Buenos Aires in June, Professor Zeleznikow presented (via web conference) on . . . [more]

Since I’m just back from France I thought it might be fun to point to one of the few government sponsored videos (entitled Crepes) that actually uses humour to get across a point about the necessity for interjurisdictional co-operation in the handling of accident benefits.

It comes from an excellent French blog, Precisement.org.

Les différentes voies de la communication juridique de l’Union européenne
Une histoire de crêpes
Ou la nécessité de coordination des sécurités sociales en Europe exposée en vidéo

It’s all about the need to carry your social security card on holiday. The EU Video . . . [more]

and, in the IP world, maybe soon coming to Canada. But this message isn’t about the upcoming Canadian version of the US DMCA.

Instead, it’s about American ingenuity, the “if at first you don’t succeed motto” and Warner Bros. ongoing attempts to control as much as it can of the profit-making capacity of the Superman character. Read about it here. The caption of the article is “Warner Bros. So Distraught Over Losing Superman Rights, It Personally Sues The Lawyer Who Won”, subtitled “from the getting-a-bit-personal dept”. The background is that WB was recently forced to return some of . . . [more]

French laws against the niqab -- and against cross-dressing.

The surviving terrorist from the Mumbai event has been sentenced to hang. The story is online at the Guardian. India currently has 52 people on “death row,” awaiting execution of their sentences. I hadn’t realized that India has not carried out a sentence of capital punishment since 2004, and prior to that not for nine years.

China, with a roughly similar number of citizens, but where the data on capital punishment are secret, is estimated to kill somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people a year through the legal process.

One of the reasons cited for the infrequency of hangings . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of India yesterday delivered a lengthy judgment in the case of Smt. Selvi & Ors. v. State of Karnataka Criminal Appeal No. 1267 of 2004, which, in the words of the Chief Justice, involved a:

batch of criminal appeals [relating] to the involuntary administration of certain scientific techniques, namely narcoanalysis, polygraph examination and the Brain Electrical Activation Profile (BEAP) test for the purpose of improving investigation efforts in criminal cases.

The three-judge bench held that “the compulsory administration the impugned techniques violated the ‘right against self-incrimination'” and violated as well “the standard of ‘substantive due process’ . . . [more]