Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, recently said,

If you come to the Net armed with the idea that the old system of copyright is going to work just fine here, this more than anything is going to get you to recognize: you need some new ideas.

To illustrate the point, he uses this remix by Ophir Kutiel of Israel, where I’m currently studying law.

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The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s confirmation hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to be associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court begin Monday morning. She will be on Capitol Hill undergoing questioning by the senators during the next week.

Of all the news outlets planning coverage, perhaps the most interesting is Associated Press. Their plan is to have live coverage via Twitter feed @AP_Courtside. They will be taking it a step further by taking questions and directions on coverage for their blog from their readers via Twitter, according to their blog post yesterday at Yahoo! . . . [more]

Frustrated consumers and lawyers alike often threaten to take complaints to the press in an attempt to get satisfaction for an alleged wrong. After all, the “headline risk” of being perceived in a bad light by the public can sometimes be a sobering reality check on whether the entity is not treating a consumer fairly, or whether the complianant is just off base.

Earlier this week, this video was placed on Youtube – was viewed over 150,000 times in its first 2 days – and resulted in United coming to the table to resolve it.

According to the story/song, the . . . [more]

Last Friday, July 3rd, the Law Commission of Ontario released our first consultation paper in our project to develop a coherent approach to the law as it affects persons with disabilities. You can also see a video that turns the tables on able-bodied people (or, in recognition of the reality that many people develop serious physical or mental challenges as they age or for other reasons, “not yet disabled people”). . . . [more]

The British Library, together with partners, has put on line the Codex Sinaticus, the earliest known surviving version of the Christian Bible, including the Old Testament, dating to somewhere in the middle of the fourth century. The website enables you to peruse certain pages of the document with varying magnification and, in some cases, with different kinds of lighting. The image you see here is a portion of Leviticus — Chapter 21, Verse 5 — chosen more or less randomly from among the many regulations and statutes found in the Septuagint.

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Further to the Slaw post yesterday, daily coverage is being posted both on the CBC News website, and on Michael Geist’s blog. From Monday:

Net neutrality doesn’t exist, CRTC told (CBCnews.ca, July 6, 2009)

CRTC Net Neutrality Hearings Open Amid ISPs’ Conflicting Claims (Michael Geist blog, July 6, 2009)

CRTC Network Management Hearings, Day One: Sandvine, Juniper, Consumer Groups (Michael Geist blog, July 6, 2009) . . . [more]

The British Library has made two million pages from forty-nine mostly regional 19th century newspapers available online. There’s a search function that does an adequate job of locating your terms within the scanned-in pages, though because of the quality of much of the type and the imaging, it’s less than perfect. (I did the, for me, obvious search on my last name, which is sufficiently uncommon to make the inquiry worthwhile: wound up with a great number of hits on the word “sudden” because the “s” was often a long ‘s’ — the one that looks like an ‘f’ — . . . [more]

I spent most of this week playing catch-up, having taken vacation the week before, and there was some great stuff to catch up on:

• Canadian developments included a new structure for Ontario’s commercialization network, new advice from BDC and new management at MSBiV (a Montreal-based commercialization entity).
• Deal news included the Neuromed-CombinatoRx merger, as well as product acquisitions and expansions for Paladin Labs and Biovail. Plus, Sumagen’s HIV vaccine candidate got picked up by the CBC; but PhRMA got dropped by Roche (which says it’s better aligned with BIO).
• Finally, the week saw some suggestions for what

Starting today, the CRTC is holding meetings in Gatineau, Quebec, to examine how Internet service providers, notably Bell and Rogers, manage and manipulate traffic on the Internet and whether this is in accordance with the Telecommunications Act. Their current “traffic shaping” practices include throttling, deep packet inspection, and putting download limits or extra charges on high bandwidth users.

There are a number of arguments against their current practice:

• smaller ISPs who buy bandwidth from Bell and resell it should be allowed to decide how to manage their own traffic, that the current practice is anti-competitive
• ISPs should not

Courts hold sittings — which demand chairs, for everyone except witnesses at least. Yet it’s surprising (okay: only mildly) how little attention gets paid to courtroom furniture, as if bums would be happy in any old seats. But if I were in London (England) right now, I’d be able to see how a couple of the world’s great architects tackled the problem.

First, however, a bit of background. After partition in India, half of Punjab went to Pakistan and the capital, Lahore, along with it. So the state and federal governments decided to construct a new, modern capital in Chandigarh, . . . [more]

Hat tip to the National Law Journal for this news:

The Michigan Supreme Court has laid the hammer down on gadget-happy jurors in banning all electronic communications by jurors during trial, including tweets on Twitter, text messages and Google searches. The ruling, which takes effect Sept. 1, will require Michigan judges for the first time to instruct jurors not to use any handheld device, such as iPhones or Blackberrys, while in the jury box or during deliberations

Read more at the Michigan Courts website

July is Juror Appreciation Month. . . . [more]

In this world of super fast document retrieval it is sometimes important to remember the basics. I was just asked for a decision where the style of cause and the citation both contained errors. The “help I can’t find this case” is usually one of my favourite problems. This Thursday after a mid-week Canada Day off is a lot like a Monday.

The citation that was given to me was a 1983 case from the O.L.R.s – obviously that was incorrect as the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviationreports that the Ontario Law Reports was published between 1901-1931 only. Rather . . . [more]