The UK House of Commons Chamber started tweeting on January 4th on the feed @HouseofCommons. The feed is maintained by House staff and provides official news and information including links to relevant items on the www.parliament.uk website and Twitter feeds from members and others. They have also been re-tweeting the UK Parliament (@UKParliament) and responding to suggestions.

 Hat tip: CBC parliamentary/political reporter Kady O’Malley  (@kady) who issues a challenge to the Canadian Parliament:

. . . [more]

No, you can’t sell those pictures you found on Twitter. But their owner also can’t enjoy an absurd windfall if you do.

Three years ago we saw heartbreaking images of a devastating earthquake in Haiti. Photographer Daniel Morel saw the devastation firsthand. As it is his work to do, he captured photos of what he saw. He also shared his images via Twitter. As it turned out, it seems much of what the world saw in the early aftermath were those pictures taken by Mr. Morel. We saw them not, however, through any arrangements made by Mr. Morel.

Agence France . . . [more]

This past Friday Aaron Swartz took his own life at the age of 26. In his short but remarkable life, Aaron had helped technologies many of us use every day, including RSS, Markdown and Reddit.

Aside from his substantial technical contributions, Aaron also made a lasting contributions to web and data freedom. He co-founded the non-profit group Demand Progress, which played an instrumental role in the fight against SOPA. He fought against public data being placed behind paywalls, and used his technical know-how to compromise such systems. In 2009 he downloaded and released over two million documents from PACER, . . . [more]

The Canadian anti-spam act was passed in December of 2010 – but is still not in force. Current speculation is that it will be in force later in 2013 – or perhaps not even until 2014.

The act contemplated 2 sets of regulations that are crucial for how the act works in practice. Regulations from the CRTC are final. We have been waiting for regulations from Industry Canada. 

Industry Canada announced on Dec 24 that its regulations will be published in the Canada Gazette on January 5th 2013 for a 30 day consultation period.

Stay tuned for more detail. . . . [more]

A German state has declared that Facebook’s policy requiring that a user identify himself by his real name violates that state’s law allowing the use of pseudonyms and contravenes the fundamental right to freedom of expression on the Internet (see here for an Associated Press article).

The Facebook Name Policy states:

Facebook is a community where people use their real identities. We require everyone to provide their real names, so you always know who you’re connecting with.

It further explains that this helps keep the Facebook community safe. Given this concern for safety, Facebook will remove all fake accounts. . . . [more]

2012 has not been a good year for RIM. The company became a favorite punching bag for technology pundits as it continued to delay products and fail in everything from marketing to developer relations. RIM’s co-CEO’s lost their job, and the company’s new CEO, Thorsten Heins, promised the company’s new operating system, BlackBerry 10, would catalyze a turnaround for the company, something many tech experts thought was delusionally optimistic.

The company has finally pinned a release date on BlackBerry 10: January 30th. Rogers and other carries are taking pre-orders today, and RIM is sending out preview hardware and software to . . . [more]

Back in August I posted a column on Slaw about a Quebec administrative tribunal decision that referred to Facebook and Wikipedia evidence.

The tribunal, the Commission sur les lésions professionnelles (CLP), has returned to the social media admissibility question Campeau et Services alimentaires Delta Dailyfood Canada inc., 2012 QCCLP 7666 (CanLII).

A worker was injured and had to take a lot of time off work. At one point her injuries caused her a case of depression that also kept her off work. To test whether this was serious, the employer created a fictitious account on Facebook, giving the alleged . . . [more]

Search engine rankings are largely the result of mathematical algorithms and repetitive bots which crawl the Internet. Search engines have historically enjoyed considerable immunity from defamation and libel claims, given that they present themselves as automated organizers of information and not publishers of the information itself. That may change soon, especially where the statements are false and the plaintiff contacts the search engine requesting that the results be modified or removed.

The Supreme Court of Victoria in Australia has ordered Google and Yahoo to pay damages for failing to modify their search results. Michael Trkulja, a prominent member of the . . . [more]

The First Annual BAILII Lecture was given on 20 November by Lord Neuberger, the President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. The event was hosted by the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP at their premises in Fleet Street , London.

BAILII stands for the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, which makes English jurisprudence and statutes available for free via the Internet. It is the equivalent of CanLII.

Entitled No judgment, no justice, the lecture focused on the importance of clearly written judgments and their wide dissemination:

1. Access to Judgments carries with it access to law

The month of December has arrived, and so have the 7th annual Canadian Law Blog Awards — a.k.a. the Clawbies! Our public nomination period runs throughout the month; and with the list over at lawblogs.ca closing in on 400 blogs, the choices are better than ever.

Please head over to the Clawbies.ca site for the complete details, but here’s a quick summary of how the awards work:

• Everyone is invited to nominate three of their favourite Canadian law blogs by tweeting (#clawbies2012), emailing, or blogging their choices. And we’re saying it clearly this year: don’t nominate your own blog.

In the fallout surrounding the American FBI investigation of CIA Director David Petraeus, you may have come across stories about how he attempted to hide his digital email trail. Utilizing a jointly held email account, messages between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell were left in draft mode, never to be sent and assumed not to leave a digital trail.

Well, leave it to the EFF to point out where things went so terribly wrong. Take a look at this tutorial released yesterday, on how to create an anonymous email account.

Some of the suggestions include:

• Using the Tor Browser Bundle;
• Signing

You may remember the Belgian newspapers’ lawsuit to prevent Google from linking to their sites, or from running short extracts from their sites in a Google News aggregation – a lawsuit that (if I recall correctly) the papers succeeded in, then found that they had a lot less traffic on their sites, so they made an arrangement with Google. It appeared that they really had intended to dip their ladles into Google’s revenue stream. It’s not clear how well they succeeded.

German newspapers seem to be taking a different route but probably to the same intended destination. They have apparently . . . [more]