U.S. attorneys are being invited to adopt volumes of the Federal Reporter in a current Law.gov digitization project from PublicResource.org. The adoption campaign is being called Yes We Scan. PublicResource.org is a non-profit organization that received the Project 10^100 Award from Google and is digitizing the Federal Reporter by “double keying” all text. Double keying involves the entire text being manually typed in twice with discrepancies being checked, and then the full text being reviewed by law students and legal professionals before being certified. The Law.gov project is meant to make U.S. primary legal materials more available.

From . . . [more]

Last week I covered the Vigna v. Levant case and mentioned that comments are a poor way to gauge readership for the purposes of damages, which some readers agreed with.

A recent article in the Alberta Law Review by Matthew Nied discusses this further, Damage Awards in Internet Defamation Cases: Reassessing Assumptions About the Credibility of Online Speech. Nied is a recent UVic graduate, former Law is Cool contributor, and author of the Defamation Law Blog, which is currently on hiatus while he clerks at the B.C.S.C.

Nied proposes that given the hyperbole frequently found online readers . . . [more]

The US Department of Homeland Security is in the process of seizing control of a number of domains that infringe on copyrighted media or “enabling selling counterfeits of trademarked goods.” Here’s the screen capture from the BitTorrent Search Engine Torrent-finder.com, post capture:

TorrentFreak has a running list of other seized domains. And here’s a quote from the Torrent-finder owner:

“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed.

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Slaw Wordled

Several sources are reporting that a Chinese company called MIC Gadget has stopped selling their Steve Jobs action figure after receiving a nastygram from Apple’s lawyers stating that it violated Apple trademarks and copyrights. See for example Mobiledia, MacLife, Mashable.

This image is from the MIC store.

I get that companies need to police their brands – but let’s think about this for a minute.

Its not as if this in practice causes any harm to Apple or Steve Jobs or confusion about their brand. It doesn’t put Steve or Apple in any bad light- in fact, . . . [more]

Many of you will launch the same group of sites each time you start your browser at the start of a the day (i.e., email, LinkedIn, Facebook, SLAW, New York Times etc.). Firefox has a great feature that will help you do this more easily.

Notice that the bottom of each folder in the Firefox bookmarks list has a “Open All in Tabs” option.

Create a bookmarks folder called “Startup” and add bookmarks to the various sites you want to launch at the start each day. One click on the “Open All in Tabs” link will open all the sites . . . [more]

A recent English court case, Football Dataco Ltd et al. v Sportradar GmbH [2010] EWHC 2911 (Ch), has held that at least for some purposes, the jurisdiction of a court over Internet content should be based on where the server was located, and not where the information online was read or used.

This seems to me to be half right. Jurisdiction should not be based on where the information was read or received, unless there is some separate activity going on there. But the location of the server should be irrelevant too. It is the location of the business . . . [more]

Google announced today they are launching a new plugin for Microsoft Office called Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. The plugin will allow Microsoft Office users to collaborate with each other seamlessly, affording the same benefits Google Docs currently delivers, such as the ability to share and edit documents simultaneously among multiple users, all within the confines of Microsoft Office’s well-known interface. The plugin is available for the Windows versions of Office 2003, 2007 and 2010.

Cloud Connect offers a bridge from Microsoft’s desktop-based productivity software to Google’s cloud-based offerings, and will offer a way for millions of Microsoft . . . [more]

Congratulations to Bennett Jones LLP, 2010 Platinum winner of the Intranet Innovations Award from Step Two Design, announced Wednesday at KMWorld 2010 in Washington, DC. They won for a number of innovations on their intranet BenNet. Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), their intranet includes features such as an improved Precedent system, a “find the children” feature that locates documents using the parent precedents, and BenNet Books.

From the Step Two Designs announcement:

Bennett Jones, the 2010 Platinum Award winner and the first law firm to win this award, has created a highly sophisticated site that

. . . [more]

A growing number of recent decisions in courts across the globe have commented on the concerns raised by the explosion in social media use by jurors in trials.

Recently England’s most senior judge commented extensively on the concerns in a trial where an overzealous juror posted details of the case, closing her summary with the question, “Did he do it?”. Now I’ve felt somewhat humbled by having to make life-altering submissions before a panel of twelve of my client’s peers, but pleading my case to the entire internet? That’s an audience that could overwhelm even the savviest advocate.

The judge . . . [more]

Don't re-invent the wheel, use the expert tools to find your information, and look for the interconnectedness of the information that you use.

There’s an interesting online book just out that explains all those things about browsers and the web that the average person doesn’t know they don’t know. But Slaw readers — who mostly know what they don’t know, right? — should take a look at “20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web” anyway; they might learn a thing or two, and more important they’ll see what can be accomplished simply with HTML5, the new, coming standard — and no plugins. And who knows, you might just find yourself one day having to explain cookies or DNS to . . . [more]