A ruling released July 1st in the copyright infringement case Viacom v. Google has created a stir in the online world. Judge Louis L. Stanton in the U.S. federal New York Southern District Court ordered Google to produce to Viacom:

all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website

Those interested in the work of the European Court of Justice, might like to subscribe to the ECJ Blog. Allard Knook, a lecturer in law at the Institute of Constitutional and Administrative Law, University of Utrecht, has regular postings in English on cases decided by the Court. . . . [more]

About a year ago founders Kevin Lai and Travis Fielding unveiled the website housing123.com, a mash-up between the Canadian Real Estate Association’s Multiple Listings Service and Google Maps. Their service allowed website visitors to view housing sales on a map rather than having to sort through pages and pages of listings on the regular MLS site.

Lai and Fielding received a cease and desist letter from CREA’s legal counsel and decided to close the site effective June 15th. There is some indication on their blog that they may re-open the site with user contributed property listings.

Blog TO’s . . . [more]

1-800-4664-411 equals 1-800-GOOG-411

Okay dear readers, another number to put on your mobile’s autodial. Google 411 launched in Canada today.

Dial 1-800-GOOG-411 to connect to a computer armed with voice recognition software.

The automated voice will ask for city and province. A voice menu runs you through finding the information you’re looking for ((Business information only – they won’t offer residential service)).

I asked for Indian restaurants in Toronto and got decent recommendations with location details and an opportunity to connect by phone. . . . [more]

To start, huge tip of hat to our colleague Jim Middlemiss, who was live blogging all morning on the three hour hearing into the BCE Bondholders dispute.

The court reserved. . . . [more]

At a Univ brunch on Park Avenue last month, I met a bright young English blogger, Roz Savage, who is blogging from a rowing boat, as she crosses the Pacific in a bid to be the first to row the largest ocean in the world. This may not have much to do with most of what we find on Slaw, but if you’re not awed by the boldness and courage of the venture, not to mention the humour of the blog, and the way that she is engaging with her friends commenting on the blog, then go to the next . . . [more]

Almost two years ago, Simon C. posted this entry about the many distractions created in the Information Age. Two years later, we’re probably just as distracted but now we need to worry about whether the Internet is messing with our intelligence. In the July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?.”

I’m glad I’m not the only know who’s noticed that longer texts are much tougher to absorb and that “power skimming” is what I regularly do. However, I’m still very much amused by the fact that I once bought a book on . . . [more]

You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, that little graphic that appears ahead of a site’s URL in a browser’s location field. (Slaw has a white ‘sl’ in a blue square, for instance.) Turns out that Google wasn’t changing for the sake of change, but in order to accommodate the various new modalities that now use browsers — PDAs, iPhones, cell phones etc. They’re in the hunt for one that will scale well and look good in various contexts.

The ones they’re testing now belong to this family:

As you might imagine, choosing a new mini-logo for . . . [more]

Those of you who, like me, were born… less recently than others, might enjoy playing with a new interface to Google developed by Stefan Grothkopp that mimics Unix command line functionality, and which takes me back to MS-DOS, Pine, Basic and beyond.

Goosh (Google shell) starts you out with a simple command line:

Put in your search terms (I used “recission”), and you are given back:

There is a help function (type h and return) that lists the various commands this front end will accept. You can search Google’s videos, images, news, maps etc, type m to get more results, . . . [more]

As announced on Google’s blog the day before yesterday, Google Finance is now displaying real-time stock quotes.

  . . . [more]

Simon noted last year the sources available for legal researchers on Microsoft’s Live.com book search.

However, an announcement on Microsoft’s blog on Friday indicated that the project is over and that this field has now been yielded entirely to Google. . . . [more]

Hate speech laws have always come in for criticism, balancing as they do on the slack wire between freedom of speech and violence to others. The brouhaha involving Mark Steyn, MacLeans and some law students is only the latest wobble on the wire, and one that I won’t go into here. But I thought Slaw readers might be interested in a provision in the Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act that the venerable (and very pro speech, shall we say) LanguageLog poked fun at today. The provision is found in section 3(1) and the part that attracted their attention . . . [more]