In April 2010, Terry Childs, a former IT employee with the City of San Francisco was sentenced to four years in prison for blocking access to the city’s network (which he designed) and refusing to turn over the passwords. It took Childs...

News reports say that there may be a postal strike in Canada later this week. If it goes ahead, I’m wondering if it might be a tipping point that leads to even less mail being sent.

If we look at the mail we receive at home (after we recycle the junk mail), much of it is bills to pay. The major utilities and credit card companies have online bill presentment options that they encourage us to use. I suspect there are a lot of people who have not made the switch to receiving their bills online simply because they are . . . [more]

With digital publishing coming of age, many publishers are rethinking how they produce and sell their content. One of the main challenges we face as publishers is making our content and products accessible.

So after talking about how tablets are a game changing technology, I finally made the plunge. It was a toss up between an Android tablet like the upcoming Samsung models, and an iPad2. There are pros and cons to each – but in the end either would be a good choice. 

I’ve had the ipad2 for about a week now, and in many ways it truly is magical. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its frustrations – the biggest of which is how Apple designs it to depend on iTunes to share content. I’m not the only one to . . . [more]

An unconference is a participatory style gathering where attendees contribute as much to the content of the event, or more, as the organizers. They’re frequently used in the technology and computer industries (i.e. “geeks”) to foster innovation, creativity and collaboration.

Unconferences though are relatively scarce in the legal community, probably due to an aversion of many to unstructured environments subject to constant change and revision. But this is also exactly what makes Law Tech Camp so fascinating.

A number of Toronto-area legal bloggers have decided to spontaneously launch a Bar-Camp style unconference on June 18, 2011 at the University of . . . [more]

Currently Universities and Colleges across Canada are spending hundreds of man-and-woman hours pulling together a list of copy machines, computers, scanners, etc., at the whim of Access Canada Copyright (got the name wrong throughout this post, initially), the agency created, and then named in high irony, to restrict the educational use of materials, to pursue an obsolete model of protecting the interests of creators, and to funnel the resulting funds into pockets unknown. At least, that’s what you might think their mandate was if you judged by their actions. For their self-image, see their About Us page.

Backed . . . [more]

I’d like to introduce a new website geared toward solo practitioners. Small Firm Innovation is still in soft-launch mode, and you’ll notice a few gaps as you navigate through the website; but early indications are that this website will capture some interesting solo perspectives. And as you’ll see below, a little CanCon to boot.

But first the disclaimers. Fellow Slaw-contributor Jack Newton and his community sherpa Gwynne Monahan at Clio are the guiding forces behind the website. In our Stem roles, colleague Jordan Furlong and myself will also be contributing, as will a host of other recognizable names.

Now . . . [more]

Following up on Dave Bilinsky’s post earlier this month, the BC distance family mediation project at Mediate BC has launched a new blog.

Located at distancemediation.ca, Susanna Jani’s goal is to provide more insights surrounding the project, and (of interest to me) reflections on how different technologies can support the families and mediators when they aren’t in the same room. As the project moves forward, regardless of whether one’s interests are in the area of mediation or technology, the insights provided should prove interesting to Slaw readers. . . . [more]

PBS has a new 13 minute video called High Fiber that looks at broadband in the Netherlands and Britain, and compares it to the US. The differences are striking. 

In Canada, we have controversies over usage based billing, and the costs of both basic internet services and fees for going over the monthly limit. And various surveys put us on a downward path in international rankings for various broadband metrics. This recent OECD survey, for example. 

The video shows that in the Netherlands and Britain more fiber is being installed (including to the home), competition is increasing, speeds are . . . [more]

The UK government commissioned a review of intellectual property policy back in November of last year. The report [PDF] of commission chair Professor Ian Hargreaves was released today, making:

…

10 recommendations designed to ensure that the UK has an IP framework best suited to supporting innovation and promoting economic growth in the digital age.

A significant thrust and recommendation of the Hargreaves Report is that policy must be made on the basis of actual evidence, principally economic evidence, rather than the urgings of lobbyists as has been too often the case. The Commission considered adopting the American “Fair . . . [more]

Can the owner of a web site accessible on the public internet refuse to allow some other person to post a link to that site, identifying whose site it is? Can the owner of the site insist that the person who wants to post the link enter into a licence agreement?

Does it make a difference to the answer if the person who wants to post a link wants to identify the site in part by the use of the principal trade mark (or logo, more likely) registered by the owner of the site? Or would it be cleaner for . . . [more]

This week’s Lawyer’s Weekly features an article by Luis Milan titled Experts Warn Cloud Computing Still Risky. The article cites recent data breaches at Sony Corp. and Epsilon Data Management as a catalyst for concern around cloud computing, and goes on to cite several experts on the potential privacy implications of these data breaches.

The only problem? Neither data breach, as the article’s title implies, has anything to do with cloud computing.

The Sony data breach, where personal information for millions of its Playstation Network users was compromised, was not the result of Sony’s cloud computing infrastructure being . . . [more]