An article in today’s London Free Press by David Canton of eLegal talks about the concern the European Commission for Justice, Freedom and Security has about tracking dots that some colour laser printers leave on printed material. From David’s article:

Printer makers are able to encode the serial number, manufacturing code and the date of printing through a series of small yellow dots interspersed on the printed paper. These dots are invisible to the naked eye…

Xerox has admitted it provided tracking dots to [the U.S.] government. At present, only select enforcement agencies have the capacity to read the codes.

Last week Simon Fodden caught all of us up on the issue of “throttling” of web access by Bell Canada that broke in the news in his post When It All Goes Peer Shaped. This issue has continued to be the talk of the tech industry all week with no indication of letting up.

The crux of the story is that Canadians are being denied access to certain aspects of the Internet with ISPs Bell and Rogers making the decisions as to which parts are denied, including access to peer-to-peer downloads of CBC TV episodes to which Canadian taxpayers . . . [more]

Today’s Globe and Mail carried an announcement of the death of Gaylen Duncan, whom many Slaw readers will recall as the dynamic Executive Director of the Canadian Law Information Council.

He was a witty, passionate, charming, brilliant pioneer, schooled by Michael Kirby (still in Halifax then) in the dark arts of making things happen. CLIC brought together lawyers, librarians, publishers and government – Gaylen was skilled in making us all share in his vision of what might be possible in a world where legal practice was empowered by technology and universal access to legal information. . . . [more]

As has been discussed multiple times on SLAW and based on two emails over the past few days, it appears the first phase of adding of older Supreme Court of Canada decisions to the court’s website has been completed. This is great news. I like the fact that the PDFs are of the actual Supreme Court Reports version (i.e., a PDF of the print version). See, for example:

Trust and Loan Co. v. Ruttan (1877), 1 S.C.R. 564
PDF file (40 pages): http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/1877/0rcs1-564/0rcs1-564.pdf

The message from colleague Rosalie Fox (Director of the SCC Library) to the CALL listserv was as . . . [more]

Gutenberg Canada, our local wing of the internet publisher of public domain texts, has just published its 100th e-book. For the honour, it’s chosen a 1904 publication, Osgoode Hall – Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar by lawyer James Cleland Hamilton (1836-1907).

For reasons of efficiency and ease of preservation, the Gutenberg folks often provide materials in the simplest of forms, which can make reading them — online or off — something of a chore rather than a pleasure. But I’m happy to say that for this work they’ve confined the html column of text to a readable width (but, . . . [more]

An organization called the Global Kids’ Digital Media Initiative launched the International Justice Center last week in support of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The official ceremony featured ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Lloyd Axworthy (former foreign affairs minister of Canada), Louise Arbour (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice), Allan Rock (former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations), and Kenneth Roth (Executive Director, Human Rights Watch).

The Center will use web technologies and ensure a presence in the virtual reality world of Second Life to mobilize young people around human . . . [more]

Those of you who would like to catch up on what happened with law and technology in Europe last year might want to take a look at CMS Cameron McKenna‘s Technology Annual Review [PDF], released last week.

From the Foreword:

Topics in this year’s Review include: selling spam lists, illegal spyware, software copyright, VoIP, the i-Gasm, CD-WOW, the Fresh Prince, E-Commerce defences, data retention, digital downloads, domain name decisions, patent ambushes, the smiley :-), Bluetooth spam, and much, much more.

I’m fairly certain I myself missed the i-Gasm.

[via Lexology – registration required] . . . [more]

For all you law and IT lovers, I am pleased to announce that Leg@l.IT is back this year! With Canada’s Privacy Commissionner, Jennifer Stoddart, and Prof. Pierre Trudel as co-presidents, three tracks with the most interesting and en vogue subjects (here is the agenda) and an impressive group of speakers, including fellow Slawers (Simon Chester, Jordan Furlong and Vincent Gautrais) and blogger (David Bilinsky), it is THE event you don’t want to miss!

Leg@l.IT is an accessible and spearheading conference, the most important of this kind in Canada, about the potential and . . . [more]

Did you miss the deadline? The Privacy Commission of Canada posted a contest to their blog last week, looking for slogans and designs for T-shirts they are planning to hand out at conferences. Unfortunately they did not give a lot of lead time; deadline was March 25th. I think the concept is a great one and would have liked to try my hand at a slogan or two. I’m sure fellow Slawyers would have come up with something witty. I’ll keep an eye on it, whether they extend the deadline.

Link courtesy of Vancouver web marketing guru Kate Trgovac . . . [more]

That’s the argument in a great posting by Bob Ambrogi, which describes the history of the last quarter century of providing greater public access to the decisions of the courts.

According to Bob, it’s all over for American caselaw, as of February 11, 2008. . . . [more]

The Oxford Handbook of Business History, edited by Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin (ISBN13: 9780199263684; 736 pages; U.S.$150) “provides a state-of-the-art survey of research in business history.” A Q&A with one of the authors explains further:

Sean Silverthorne: What is the purpose of the book, and who is the intended audience?

Geoff Jones: The purpose of this book is to provide a state-of-the-art overview of business history research worldwide. It seeks to speak to researchers in management, economics, sociology, and history who want to know about the latest research in business history, as well as to a wider audience

The Canadian Constitution is a point of no small amount of pride in many Canadians and also a point of some contention. In this day and age we sometimes struggle to fit issues of the modern day with the Constitution. Equality rights, euthanasia, religion, terrorism and more, are all issues which we struggle to fit into our constitutional framework. Another issue has been added to the list: Migratory Birds.

In August of 1916 Canada (or more properly the U.K.) and the United States concluded a treaty in recognition of the importance of protecting Migratory Birds which were “…in danger . . . [more]