Like most teenagers in Canada, my children have Facebook accounts. Some of the family rules for having a Facebook account is that my children must be my ‘friend’, we have a discussion about privacy settings, and acknowledgment that they know that I am watching their wall and photos for appropriate behaviour. The Mireau Giggles have had to sit through many discussions about privacy, bullying, the longevity of digital media, et cetera, et cetera. It probably drives them nuts, but parenting is a job.

One thing I do not have much control over is who tags them in photos. The only . . . [more]

One of the ways that we at Slaw stay in touch with our readers is through search engines’ reports on websites that refer to us. The fact that the internet has shrunk the world — or expanded my small part of it, which is the other way to look at it — continues to amaze me, as it did once again when I came across a reference to Slaw in a Bulgarian blog on media law, [Медийно право] [Нели Огнянова]. What caught their attention, I should mention, was the recent post by Dan Pinnington, The 2/3 Rule Will Make . . . [more]

Thumper’s law: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”.

The cost of not being nice was recently measured in a recent social media defamation settlement. The New York Times (among others) recently reported a $430,000.00 settlement was reached in Simorangkir v. Love.

The Citizen Media Law Project has a great deal of information on this saga, including pleadings.

I would like to see a judicial decision address the issue of whether there is defamation via a 140 character tweet. I don’t think media reports of a settlement are quite enough to settle this . . . [more]

In a previous post, I have outlined a draft Request for Proposal structure (RFP) in relation to courts securing services to develop, deploy and manage a web site designed in accordance with the CCCT IntellAction Working Group Guidelines on Court Web Sites.

In this post, please find our draft evaluation criteria in relation to the RFPs. . . . [more]

The guidelines have the following objectives:

• to enable a common understanding and context of what modern web sites offer and how they are powered (Part I)
• to identify and review issues that are specific to court web sites, as opposed to web sites in general (Part II)
• to develop a principled approach to court web site development (Part III)
• to make specific recommendations on the modernization of court web sites based on modern web site context, court web site issues and selected principles (Part IV)

Part V of the guidelines facilitates adoption of the recommendations in Part IV by providing . . . [more]

This post concludes with the last two draft recommendations of the CCCT IntellAction Working Group on Court Web Site Guidelines:

• Site Features – Keep It Simple
• Publication of information – Make It Simple

The previous draft recommendations can be found here:

• Court Web Site: Use a Web Content Management System
• Court Intranets: Use the same Web Content Management System
• Recommended content of court web sites
• Search, Navigation & Taxonomies – Keep It Simple

Grateful for any comments and suggestions that you may have – merci! . . . [more]

Google’s Gmail service is suffering an outage that has left 120,000 of its 150 million Gmail users without e-mail, contacts, labels and other content since the weekend. While some will no doubt use the incident as a basis to proclaim the cloud as unreliable, the truth of the matter is more complex. Both on-premise and cloud-based services can, potentially, suffer from data loss. With on-premise services, you (or your IT staff) are typically 100% responsible for backing up your data, securely storing it, and testing recovery procedures. All (or at least most) cloud-based services will take care of this for . . . [more]

Last Saturday, I shared on Slaw the first two recommendations of the CCCT IntellAction Working Group on Court Web Site Guidelines. In this post, I’m sharing our draft recommendations 3 and 4.

(note: in the next few days, I will share our two remaining recommendations, 5 and 6)

As usual – your comments and suggestions are welcome! Please let us know if you think we are in the right direction… . . . [more]

Last Thursday, Ryerson University hosted a symposium entitled “Exploring the Future of E-mail, Privacy and Cloud Computing at Ryerson.” It was co-hosted by a Ryerson administrative committee and Ryerson’s Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute for the purpose of seeking input on Ryerson’s own plans to upgrade its e-mail and collaboration systems, including its open consideration of cloud based services. Ryerson was kind enough to open the event to individuals outside of its own community, and attracted a number of interested observers from other Ontario post-secondary educational institutions, many of which are also intrigued by the clear benefits of outsourcing to . . . [more]

This posts continues to expose on Slaw the draft Court Web Site Guidelines produced by the CCCT IntellAction Working Group on court web sites. In this post, we present recommendations 1 and 2 contained in Part IV of the guidelines, together with related context information. The context information is taken from Part I of the guidelines.

In short, the CCCT IntellAction Working Group on Court Web Sites recommends to courts using the same Web Content Management System (WCMS) to power their public, internet web sites and to power their internal, intranet web site.

A Web Content Management System is . . . [more]

The administrative control of court web sites can be a sensitive issue, because it often cuts across the independence of the Judiciary and resources of the Executive. In consideration of this issue, we felt that our guidelines had to address the issue. The following text is our draft on topic. . . . [more]

The Office of the Chief Judge of the Provincial Court of British Columbia recently released a policy statement [PDF] regarding public and media access. A few sections of the policy are directed at using computers and other digital devices to transmit information during proceedings:

e. Computers
Members of the public and the media are permitted to use portable computers in Provincial Court provided that they do not disturb the proceedings or interfere with the operation of the court’s own electronic equipment, and that the computers are used solely for the purpose of note-taking.

f. Cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDA’s)