When I got back from vacation just over a week ago I discovered there was an elephant in the room: a possible looming federal election that no one really wanted to discuss. Except, perhaps, the media. We’ve even avoided discussing it here on Slaw for whatever reason (are we just too polite to talk politics in public? How very Canadian). In the meantime we have a lovely trio of election-related controversies from which to sample: . . . [more]

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice released its decision on an application in York University v. Bell Canada Enterprises this Friday. The case is based on an allegedly defamatory e-mail about the President of York University, Mamdouh Shoukri, saying he had “perpetrated an outrageous fraud.”

A group calling itself “York Faculty Concerned About the Future of York University” protested the appointment of Martin Singer of the new Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, questioning his credentials and attaching a letter from other academics who did disclose their names.

But the University is more interested in the identity of . . . [more]

Are rapping Klingons the answer to copyright violation? Probably not.

In 1992, the Software Publishers Association, now the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), released a video, “Don’t Copy that Floppy,” aimed at youth to curb the use of copyrighted materials such as games. The video starred a rapper-lawyer M.E. Hart, as well as interviews with various persons from the industry.

The digitally remastered 1992 video is available on Hart’s YouTube Channel.

This past week SIIA released a sequel to the video, focusing on copyright of games, music, and software. It starts out with a bunch of contemporary . . . [more]

Forty years ago, on September 7, 1969, the Official Languages Act officially came into force.

The legislation recognized the equal status of English and French in federal institutions and in Canadian society.

All week long, the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages is marking the occasion through meetings, discussions, and exhibitions.

As Graham Fraser, the Commissioner of Official Languages, wrote in the August 31, 2009 edition of The Hill Times:

“Bilingualism ‘is at the core of what this country means’ but Canadians don’t have a sense of ownership of both official languages, says Graham Fraser, the Commissioner

The Guardian carried a story this weekend on Interpol’s online database of stolen art objects. The idea is that by making information — photos, dimensions, etc. — available to art dealers and interested members of the public, it might become harder for thieves to sell on stolen art, at least to unwitting buyers.

What intrigued me was that despite talking about the database website and the fact that 400 people had applied for passwords to view the art the Guardian piece failed to give its readers a URL for the site. I’ve banged on about this before, I know; but . . . [more]

The controversial cash grab…er, law…known as s. 172(1) of the Highway Traffic Act along with Regulation 455/07 have been deemed unconstiutional by a Judge in Napanee in the case of R v. Rahman (unfortunately, the case is not currently reported and therefore I cannot provide a full text of the decision but thank you to James Morton for summarizing the case on his blog).

The law essentially creates serious penal consequences for excessive speeding (anything over 50kph above the posted limit) and had been challenged constitutionally before in several failed attempts. This time around, Justice Griffin was convinced that . . . [more]

As someone with Scottish heritage (no, not the Tjaden side), it was fun to read the news stories about the trade-mark battle in Malaysia in which McDonald’s failed in its attempt to block a curry restaurant whose nomenclature was Malaysian Chicken Curry from using McCurry as its name.

What about McSlaw for Multi Content Slaw?

I doubt Simon McFodden would go for it . . . . . . . [more]

Data about individuals can be a valuable resource. Organizations holding personal information often aggregate or anonymize that data in order to gain valuable information on various trends. From a privacy perspective, that’s perfectly acceptable, as individuals can no longer be identified. Or can they?

The caveat is that is has been known for some time that it is not as easy to anonymize individual data as one might think. Reidentification of individuals by comparing anonymized data to other sources of data has been surprisingly easy in some cases.

Slashdot points to an ars technica article that talks about a paper . . . [more]

This is a great time to be a Canadian labour and employment lawyer, but Canadian law schools now employ fewer full-time labour and employment professors than they have in decades. This post highlights the issue and invites comment about the relationship between our law schools and the maintenance of a vibrant and well-qualified labour and employment bar.

The declining faculty issue first caught my attention when, in February, York University professor David Doorey published a blog post entitled “Employment Law Practice is Booming, But Someone Should Tell the Law Schools.” Professor Doorey noted the significance of labour and employment issues . . . [more]

Just when you thought every niche had been filled, up comes an area of practice to remind you that this is a more wrinkled world than we are typically aware and the practice of law is a force second only to life itself, perhaps, when it comes to occupying all imaginable spaces: there is a law of algae.

It occupies a website, too, of course, which, appropriately is LawOfAlgae.com, a.k.a. Stoel Rives LLP, a Minneapolis firm specializing in renewable energy. Which is where algae comes in. Evidently it is an up-and-coming source of biomass from which to make . . . [more]

I’ve talked before about how important outreach and consultation are to the Law Commission of Ontario. We try to reach professional organizations and groups (lawyers, of course, but others, too, such as engineers, architects and accountants so far) and community-based groups (the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, and the Council on Aging Frontenac-Kingston, to name two of many), as well as legal clinics which are a bit of a hybrid. Now we’ve allocated additional resources to this commitment. . . . [more]

The August 2009 issue [pdf] of the Ontario Bar Association’s magazine Briefly Speaking/EnBref has an article by David Whelan, Manager, Legal Information for the Law Society of Upper Canada on using free and inexpensive legal research tools called “Right Size Your Research”–see pages 24 and 25 [pdf]. I like that he emphasizes texts as a starting point, and of course endorses use of law libraries as a helpful resource. This is a nice round-up of resources for those looking to economize, especially for legal researchers who do not already have flat rate subscriptions to major online legal research . . . [more]