Is anybody – any international body – studying the legal basis for jurisdiction over personal information as it crosses national borders, or considering the law that should be applicable to such PI?

This could be thought of as ‘law applicable to the cloud’ in these days of cloud computing, though I don’t think it’s limited to that.

The Hague Conference on Private International Law in April 2010 noted [PDF p.18] as an ‘additional subject’ for work, more I think in the lines of a watching brief:

The Council invited the Permanent Bureau to continue to follow developments in the following

. . . [more]

The great Code of Hammurabi, nearly 4,000 years old, was written in cuniform script in Akkadian, a lingua franca for much of the middle east and north Africa at the time.

Thanks to the efforts of scholars at Cambridge, you can now hear what it might have sounded like. (Obviously, there’s no way to know with any certainty how Akkadian sounded, but certain clues, comparisons, and good guesses can give us an idea.) Here is a link to an MP3 file on Slaw’s server; you can also access the recording on the Cambridge site.

The . . . [more]

Time flies when you are having fun. For those of us in Alberta anticipating changes to court rules on November 1, 2010, time has flown quickly indeed.

I have written about the new Alberta Rules of court here and here and here, but just in case, I thought it worthwhile to touch on this topic one more time.

I have spent quite a bit of time lately helping with the final checks of my firm’s court precedents collection. Alberta’s Rules are significanly changing and so the form of documents that will be filed on and after November 1, 2010 . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada released the highly-anticipated decision in Globe and Mail v. Canada on Friday. The court considered three appeals emerging from the Sponsorship Scandal or “AdScam,” where a misappropriation of public funds in Quebec under Paul Martin’s Liberal Party of Canada, which ultimately led to his party’s downfall. The scandal is still cited as one of the main reasons why the Federal Liberals continue to suffer in the polls.

The Globe & Mail has made their factum and the respondent’s factum available on their website, along with responses from various individuals in the legal and publishing . . . [more]

Some email programs automatically delete old emails after a fixed time. Most come with a function that allows the owner of the system to set up a time after which old emails are automatically deleted (unless they have been moved to particular storage folders, probably). This function seems useful to avoid clutter. It’s like a record destruction schedule.

Is there a standard time at which such auto-delete functions should be set, or should there be? What’s a safe time, legally as well as practically? It is clear enough that without such a function, some people (most?) would never get around . . . [more]

privilege for legal advice from accountants?

On September 29, 2010, new legislation allows Quebec to enter into reciprocal agreements with other Canadian provinces and territories to enforce the payment of wages and other moneys owed to local employees of Quebec-based organizations, as laid out in the other jurisdictions’ respective employment standards legislation.

I am wondering about the current Canadian rules on intermediary liability, if any — mainly for online intermediaries.

I note the provision of Quebec law (An Act to establish a legal framework for information technology, R.S.Q. c. C-1.1, s. 22.):

A service provider […] is not responsible for the activities engaged in by a service user […]

However, the service provider may incur responsibility, particularly if, upon becoming aware that the documents are being used for an illicit activity, or of circumstances that make such a use apparent, the service provider does not act promptly to block

. . . [more]

There has been a lot of press over the Privacy Commissioner’s decision that the Google Street View collection of information from unprotected wifi signals breached PIPEDA. See the press release, and the decision. See examples of press reports by the CBC and CTV. The CTV report says that Spanish regulators announced they were filing a lawsuit against Google for the incident, seeking millions in fines.

I know nothing more about this than I read in the press – but I think we need to put Google’s actions in perspective here. Yes, it should not have collected that . . . [more]

This past week the Alberta Queen’s Bench released Pridgen v. University of Calgary, 2010 ABQB 644, a decision which quashed the academic discipline of students who had criticized a university professor.The applicants were participants in a Facebook group that used potential defamatory statements, which prompted in a complaint by the professor that resulted in non-academic discipline for misconduct.

The university did not allow the students to appeal the decision to the Board of Governors Discipline Appeal Committee, thereby preventing them from exhausting all internal remedies before seeking judicial review. . . . [more]

In the course of this profession you occasionally come across little oddities that catch your attention and amuse you. When it happens to me I often share them here at Slaw. The most recent oddity to catch our attention is an interestingly named case from Nova Scotia in 1919, The King v. Fifty Gallons Rum, (1919) 53 NSR 131, 31 CCC 10. Hitherto I had been unaware that an inanimate object could be named in an criminal case. In this instance it seems that Fifty Gallons of Rum, was caught at the wrong place, at the wrong . . . [more]

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) released last month a report out of the Oversight and Review Division, Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The mandate of the OIG is to conduct independent investigations and special reviews of DOJ personnel and programs. The purpose of this 200-page redacted report, A Review of the FBI’s Investigations of Certain Domestic Advocacy Groups, was to respond to media reports and Congressional inquiries alleging that the FBI had improperly targeted domestic advocacy groups between 2001-2006bsolely based on their peaceful exercise of their First Amendment Rights.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren’s letter to the . . . [more]