A few days ago, I presented the issue of copyright & licensing of information found on court web sites. In this post, please find – please feel welcome to comment! – our draft on the topic of “Balancing Privacy and Public Access to Court Information: The Need for Confidentiality Rules”. Essentially, our recommendation on topic is to follow the Canadian Judicial Council Model Policy on topic. . . . [more]

The HB Gary email leak just keeps on giving. First reported over a week ago, the leak of more than 50,000 internal emails was made by Anonymous, and revealed planned attacks by HB Gary on Wikileaks. The attacks were to be made at the behest of Bank of America, as it girded its loins in preparation for a promised exposure. Apart from demonstrating government involvement in the plot, which included targeting journalists the email have also shown a similar conspiracy in service of the US Chamber of Commerce. Now the emails have revealed the extent to which . . . [more]

How often do you have to capture the contents of websites, for use in presentations, as trial exhibits or to illustrate your fabulous slaw.ca posts? You can do the usual “print screen” function that’s built into your operating system, but that usually snags a whole bunch of other stuff (like your toolbars or other tabs that are open). Usually you want to show the web page only, without other distracting stuff that detracts from what you want to convey. In addition, using “print screen” it only captures the portion of the webpage what’s visible on the screen, not the entire . . . [more]

About a year ago, I announced the creation of a Canadian Centre for Court Technology (CCCT) “IntellAction” working group with the mandate to promote the modernization of court web sites in Canada by way of producing guidelines on topic. We have now finished our first draft and invite you to take a look, in upcoming weeks, to selected parts of the guidelines. Your comments and suggestions are welcome! . . . [more]

The things some lawyers get up to! Take Eben Moglen for instance. After working at IBM as a programmer, he attended Yale Law; then he clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, after which went back to Yale to get a Ph.D. in history; then it was on to Columbia Law and a professorship there. Enough laurels there for him to rest comfortably for pretty much ever, you’d think. But no: harking back to his early days in computers, he started the Software Freedom Law Centre in 2005 and now he’s launched the FreedomBox Foundation — which is what I want to . . . [more]

Nominations for the Law Society of Upper Canada’s 2011 Bencher Elections closed on February 11, 2011. A complete list of candidates can be found here.

Although there was some discussion about having this election entirely paperless, the law society has opted to have both Internet and mail-based voting in place.

We’re already starting to see some heavy campaigning online. . . . [more]

The UK Press Complaints Commission, a non-governmental, self-regulatory body fielding complaints about the content of British newspapers, ruled today that material published on Twitter is not private and did not violate the editorial code of practice. The Daily Mail republished some of Sarah Baskerville’s tweets. She is employed by the Department of Transport and as a civil servant is bound not to “call into doubt the impartiality of the civil service,” which, the Daily Mail felt, some of her tweets did.

From the adjudication:

The article referred to the fact that the complainant had in her tweets: described the

Yes, there are plenty of ways you can compromise your online identity by (mis-) using a dating website. A scenario not everyone considers, however, is having your password stolen and used to hijack other aspects of your online identity.

If this sounds like a nightmare scenario, it is. And it happened to over 300 users of popular Vancouver-based dating website PlentyOfFish.com last week when a hacker compromised the site’s security and retrieved real names, passwords and e-mail addresses for a small subset of the site’s 11,000,000 users.

The breach highlights an error that PlentyOfFish and many other websites make: storing . . . [more]

On the occasion of the OBA Institute 2011 last week, another law blogger meetup was held in Toronto. Unlike the previous week’s Toronto law blogger meetup, this one was female dominated. It is great to see so much interest in blogging! One participant, a law blogger wannabe, said she wants to start blogging once she finds a focus for content. While focus on a specific topic (or range of topics) is helpful if one is highlighting a specific practice, the actual type of content does not need to be restricted.

Law blogging is particularly challenging because of the need . . . [more]

For those of you keeping track, Wikimedia Foundation (who bring us Wikipedia, the MediaWiki platform it is housed on, and numerous other projects) has just announced new general counsel: Geoff Brigham, formerly of eBay, who will be moving from Paris to San Francisco for his new position starting March 7th.

From the February 4th announcement by Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director:

As a growing U.S.-based non-profit that operates one of the world’s most popular websites in partnership with a global network of volunteers, we need a GC who can handle a broad range of legal issues including the

A couple weeks back I posted about the challenge of preserving web-based evidence. Sharon Nelson (of Sensei Enterprises and Slaw) has linked over to some great input from Ben Wright (of SANS Computer Forensics) on the topic, including a blog post and this video.

This seems to do a good job of meeting most of the requirements I identified. What do you think? . . . [more]

The Real Estate industry can rest a little easier knowing that Google won’t be coming to their rescue. Earlier today Google announced that they will be discontinuing their Maps Real Estate Search feature on Feb 11th; citing “low usage” as the major factor in the decision.

The change won’t disrupt those organizations that rely on Google as their mapping backbone, however — see the map-based filtering provided on MLS.ca as an example. Google will continue to offer their maps API for developers to innovate. Though I’ll presume the CREA will continue to be protective over its data, so that . . . [more]