Out-law.com reports a recent decision of the Court of Appeal for England and Wales, R. v. Sheppard and Whittle, upholding a conviction for publishing hate literature though the material was stored on servers in California.

The connecting factor was that a “substantial measure of the activities” of the accused took place in England.

This is consistent with the Canadian decision in Citron v Zundel (Canada Human Rights Commission), where the material was also on a California server.

The English (and Welsh) Court held that the material could be held to be published without evidence that anyone actually read it. . . . [more]

As today is the opening of Vancouver Olympic Games, I thought we could celebrate in the Slaw way, which is by looking at the legal aspects of the event. In looking at the Olympics there has been no small amount of legislative activity both Federally and in B.C. regarding the games. I’m not going to get into the court activity in this post.

Federal

The IOC is always extremely vigilant in protecting their trademarks and in Canada an act has been passed to guarantee that:
The Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act, S.C. 2007, c.25

There is the small . . . [more]

I dislike waiting. Someone doing a word association test would never blurt my name as a response if the word “patience” was provided. Lucky for me, tomorrow ends the wait for the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Tercon Contractors Ltd. v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of the Province of British Columbia by her Ministry of Transportation and Highways.

There is a considerable amount of commentary about Tercon available from a wide variety of sources on the web:

• Tercon Heads For Supreme Court Showdown
• Supreme Court weighs the rules around bidding
• Supreme Court of Canada to Hear

In the U.S. there’s a League of Technical Voters the aim of which is to motivate and assist “technical experts to improve lawmaking and governmental process.” Citability.org, a project supported by that league and other organizations, is tackling one small part of the lawmaking-improvement process by urging “advanced permalinks” on American legislatures. Their complaints about the situation outside commercial databases are familiar:

• links to statutes too often go to large PDF files;
• where there are HTML files of legislation online, it isn’t possible to link to particular clauses within the legislation
• when legislation changes, earlier online versions of provisions

Three cases that are making their way through the Ontario court system have a few things in common: they’re all recent, all under the Class Proceedings Act, they’re all significant claims and they all name prominent Toronto law firms as defendants. . . . [more]

The war of the Twilight documentary films is on, and producers who shop their film concepts around to distributors may be thinking twice about what more they can do to protect their hatchling ideas. It has been reported that Summit Entertainment LLC has filed a complaint against Topics Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. District Court (California) over Topics’ documentary film: “Forks: Bitten by Twilight.” Summit is the producer and distributor of the Twilight series of films (Twilight, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon), based on the Twilight series of books by author Stephanie Meyer. Summit . . . [more]

On January 28, 2010, the Law Commission of Ontario and IP Osgoode held a Symposium on electronic medical records. The Symposium brought together experts from law, academia, health and other areas as part of the consultation that Professor Pina D’Agostino is carrying out in her project on the intersection of IP, ethics and privacy issues arising from electronic medical records. Professor D’Agostino is an Osgoode LCO Scholar in Residence and she is carrying out her project in association with the LCO. All these issues were discussed, with some passion in some cases, but so was a more fundamental question about . . . [more]

Interested in tax law developments? Davies has put out a clear and easy to understand publication “US and Canada Tax Law: What to Watch for in 2010.”

It reviews tax developments in the US and Canada from the past year, and it also provides perspectives on the key developments impacting the US and Canadian taxation of international companies and investors in 2010. . . . [more]

I’m not sure whether it was the interception Peyton Manning threw last night, or my work earlier in the day trying to get my notebook to talk to my new router, but this week started looking like it was all about failed connections:

Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBMs), pharmaceutical companies and government payors have all expressed a shared goal: getting “the right treatment, to the right patient, the first time.” Doing so would improve care (personalized medicine) and decrease costs (c0mparative effectiveness). However, as industry players try to connect their employees, patients and customers with personalized treatments, they will . . . [more]

In a February 4, 2010, article in the Toronto Globe and Mail about what is going to be a “high-profile” trial for murder, under the headline

 A shocking school slaying rendered sterile in court

Christie Blatchford, who should know better, complained that the Crown’s opening statement “managed to render murder dull.” She wrote:

This is modern Canadian justice, where even such a shocking killing is rendered sterile, the poor victim barely given a nod, all in the name, presumably, of a prosecution so measured that no one will ever again be wrongfully convicted – or at least not because a

An English court has refused an injunction against the publication of the story of an alleged affair between a well-known football player and a teammate’s girlfriend: Terry v. Persons Unknown [2010] EWHC 119 (QB).

English law has recently given a good deal of protection to the privacy of celebrities, so some people have wondered if that protection is being reduced by this decision. Out-law.com says No.

One of the reasons (among several) for refusing the injunction in this case was that the application appeared to aim at protecting the player’s commercial sponsorships, rather than in protecting his feelings . . . [more]

If we’re at all edgy here at Slaw, it’s likely to be at the lip of the technology cliff that we’re writing. But a small piece in today’s Globe and Mail sent me hareing off to the edge of the known world of rights. The article referred to the fact that Switzerland had recently changed its constitution to protect the dignity of plant life, which, if true, would take the already difficult business of rights one step beyond Lemmings’ Leap.

What’s put the Swiss Republic into the news this time is an upcoming popular referendum (March 7) on whether domesticated . . . [more]