I just received this message via Facebook:

Hi Creative Commons Cause,
As you have probably heard, Facebook has been revising their terms of service.

This has spawned a grassroots movement inside Facebook to encourage the platform to adopt Creative Commons licenses, similar to Flickr or blip.tv‘s implementation.

The group has gained momentum and already has almost 2,000 members, so we thought we would point it out to you, our supporters.

Check it out if you’re interested in organizing for this feature and see some of the mockups of what CC-in-Facebook might look like:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=55178542061

Thanks for your continued support!

A contentious policy week on both sides of the border:

• In Canada, a meeting this week between the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Gary Goodyear, Canada’s Minister of Science and Technology descended into a shouting match over cuts to research funding announced in Canada’s 2009 federal budget.
• In the U.S., old controversies were stirred by the introduction of the Patent Reform Act of 2009(high-tech vs. biotech); by the Supreme Court’s ruling, in Wyeth v. Levine, that drug makers are not exempt from state tort liability (tort reform vs. plaintiffs’ bar); and by the nomination of Kathleen Sibelius to

Canadians used to think about HIV/AIDS as a problem that only affected people in Sub-Saharan Africa, or homosexual males.

Thanks to the efforts of many activists this perception has shifted, and there is a broader awareness of its challenges among the general population.

On May 12, 2009 I will be part of a Canadian delegation that is presenting at the United Nations at the 53 Session on the Commision on the Status of Women. As one of the few law students in the group, I will try to address some of the legal and policy issues facing women in . . . [more]

Hawaiian legislators are working on a bill to ensure collection of state sales tax on goods and services bought online from out of state, while Idaho legislators have declined to do any such thing:

Hawaii Proposes To Collect Taxes On Internet Sales
Buying tax-free music, books and electronics over the Internet would be a thing of the past under legislation pending before Hawaii lawmakers. The measure being pushed by Senate Democrats is meant to force online shoppers of Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. to pay the state’s 4 percent general excise tax, just like customers who buy the same items

I wanted to make sure we didn’t overlook this item, even though it was prominent in the news this week.

On Tuesday, March 3rd the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador released the report from the Commission of Inquiry on Hormone Receptor Testing exploring how testing failed to give correct results for women facing breast cancer in Newfoundland over a number of years, and providing a number of recommendations to prevent the same from happening again.

The Commission was established by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador under its Public Inquiries Act, 2006 on July 3, 2007. The Honourable Margaret A. . . . [more]

The CanLII blog announced that their new legislation system is now live. It is not a Friday.

The main improvements introduced by this new approach are:

* Versions of statutes and regulations reflect real changes;
* Legislative updates are carried out on a weekly basis;
* Versions’ dates correspond to legislative changes, such as entry into force, amendment or repeal;
* You can search a legislative text as it was legally binding on a particular date in the past. Historical coverage is approximately five years;
* You can compare two different versions of a particular document;
* You can

Legal IT 3.0 is coming up on April 20 & 21 in Montreal. Dominic Jaar is once again heading up the organizing committee and has put the program together along with Xavier Beauchamp-Tremblay.

It is the largest and the most important event of the year in Canada on information technology for law. Dozens of experts from Canada and internationally (United States, France and Australia), including the keynote speaker Ronald J. Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, will be there. You will also see some Slaw folk speaking including Simon Chester, Steve Matthews, me, and of . . . [more]

Congratulation to Slaw’s own Dominic Jaar, who has just been named CEO of the Canadian Centre for Court Technology. From the press release:

The mandate for the CCCT is:

1) Bringing the justice sector stakeholders together, including deputy ministers, lawyers, senior court administrators, judges and representatives of the public, to create an atmosphere favourable to technological innovation and excellence in our court systems to enhance access to justice.
2) Supporting the effective transfer and sharing of information between courts and other elements of the justice system.
3) Providing the tools and activities needed to exchange information and

ABA TECHSHOW 2009 is quickly approaching – April 2-4 in Chicago – and as the earlybird registration was just extended to March 6, you have a few more days to save up to $400 on registration fees.

After several years on the organizing committee, and as Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2007, it could easily be claimed that I am a tad biased about this conference. I won’t deny that – but I think this conference speaks for itself.

ABA TECHSHOW, now in its 23rd year, is the world’s premier legal technology CLE conference and expo. The conference offers more than . . . [more]

The Bank of Canada has just announced it has dropped its target for the overnight rate by 50 basis points to 0.5%. You may recall back in December that we started on this descent into unprecedented lows known as the “race to zero”. The goal is to help the Canadian economy recover from the current recession. According to Bank of Canada’s news release: . . . [more]

Yesterday’s New York Times article Copyright Challenge for Sites that Excerpt by Brian Stelter explores the boundaries as to what is acceptable with regard to excerpting from news stories by other websites, and what is causing news publishers to become uncomfortable. When is it acceptable to quote the majority of an article in a blog post? Is it okay to take a whole RSS feed from a news source (which they are freely supplying), and republish it on a website with additional advertising?

It seems that it all depends on who is doing the republishing. Prominent free news aggregator Google . . . [more]

Lots of biotech and pharma deal activity is ongoing in Canada and around the world, including Roche’s debt offering to fund its Genentech bid and an unsolicited offer by JLL Partners for Patheon, which was founded in Canada.

New regulations are on the way for organic food in Canada, where cloned animals will be excluded; and for genetic information in the U.S., where the EEOC started hearings to implement Title II of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.

Regulatory optimism from GTC Biotherapeutics, which started a collaboration with New Zealand’s AgResearch for animal-produced biosimilars; but pessimism from . . . [more]