The Electronic Commerce Protection Act, Bill C-27, has passed second reading in Parliament and will go to committee for review.

Views seem to differ on parts of the bill, while other parts are generally accepted.

One of the areas of contention deals with the degree of consent required to send someone an email. The Bill has an ‘opt in’ system, by which the sender needs the express or implied consent of the addressee to send a message. An existing business relationship may imply consent.

However, some people say that the Bill is so broadly drafted that it would prohibit . . . [more]

The folks at Online University Lowdown have put together their listing of the 50 Best Blogs for Law Librarians. Congratulations to our own Steve Matthews whose Vancouver Law Librarian Blog was included at #4! . . . [more]

Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef has launched the University of the People. Under the auspices of the U.N.’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People offers tuition-free education to anyone able to connect via the internet in two programs, Business Administration and Computer Science. At the moment the institution does not grant degrees, although it is seeking accreditation.

The somewhat tenuous connection to law — and thus to Slaw — lies in the fact that a number of the University’s advisors are lawyers: Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law . . . [more]

George Mason University’s note-taking and bibliographic plugin for Firefox, Zotero, is now available in version 2.0 (beta 3) and boasts a number of new features. So far as I know, Zotero is still at legal odds with Thomson Reuters concerning Zotero’s ability to import data from the latter’s Endnote. But that doesn’t seem to be slowing them down much. We’ve talked about Zotero a lot on Slaw, but for those still not acquainted with this really impressive, free, open-source program, there’s a video on the Zotero website that will give you a quick overview of its features. And . . . [more]

There weren’t exactly an Ark’s worth of devleopments this week, but what did develop came two-by-two.

This week saw two very public regulatory developments in the U.S.:

• The FDA took two heavy steps against highly visible advertising: they said that General Mills’ claims on Cheerios boxes that the cereal can help lower cholesterol means that Cheerios are a drug and should be tested and regulated accordingly; and they chastised a number of pharma companies for ads placed with Google because the ads (limited to 95 characters) do not contain the required risk information. 
• Also in the U.S., Rep. Pallone

I have seen the future of search – and this demo of Wolfram|Alpha is so mindboggling in conception and ambition that when the site launches I want to experiment at length, when it launches on Monday. It’s essentially about fusing an analytical engine on top of search, drawing data from the web and then crunching it in a myriad of different ways. “Wolfram Alpha is like a cross between a research library, a graphing calculator, and a search engine.” “Wolfram Alpha can generate and compute vast amounts of data and present it using visual charts, spreadsheets and . . . [more]

We don’t realize how much we rely on a service until it’s unavailable.

Did any Slaw readers get affected by the Google outage?

The headline in Information Week read:

Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Analytics, YouTube, AdSense, and Blogger experienced outages Thursday morning, according to discontented Twitter users.

Here is the statement:

“Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users, from approximately 3:30 AM until around 7:00 AM, Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved. We know how important Google News hit is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

“The . . . [more]

If you’ve not yet had your fill of Richard Susskind, the much-mentioned-on-Slaw author of The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, you can hear him in conversation with Berkman Center’s Brock Rutter in a discussion recorded yesterday on how IT can make practice “better and more efficient through the use of software and applications to streamline repetitive legal tasks.”

The interview is found on Radio Berkman. . . . [more]

I can’t do more than point to some links, but Google’s pre-emptive response to Wolfram|Alpha appears to be about to launch.

It is discussed by the BBC, ZDNet , SearchEngineWatch and Inquisitr . The Beeb says

It takes information from the web and displays it in a spreadsheet in “split seconds”, something Ms Mayer said would normally take someone half a day to do.

During the demonstration, a query for “small dog” was typed into the search box. Seconds later a table popped up showing photographs of various dogs, their origin, weight and height in a clear and simple

Google today launched a set of new options for filtering and presenting its search results. Now when you do a search, you’ll see a link in the upper left corner of the results page offering to “show options”:

This opens a menu down the right-hand side of the window displaying a dozen filters, as shown in the image to the left. The videos option displays thumbnails of videos, mostly from YouTube, whose titles contain your search terms. The forum option (somehow) manages to find in your results the hits from forums. Reviews seems to select journals and book reviews. The . . . [more]

The media are slowly picking up on the number of court cases that are requiring disclosure of Facebook and other social network pages in litigation. SunMedia has a story today — see, e.g. “Social networking plays out in court” in the North Bay Nugget, and yesterday there was a story on Canoe Technology, “Facebook content showing up in lawsuits.” [See also “An Obligation to Discuss Facebook During Discovery,” from a couple of months ago on Slaw.]

Ian Kerr of U of Ottawa is quoted in the Sun Media story as saying this:

“The courts

Evernote, the great cross-platform, syncing, note-taking tool is now available for BlackBerry users. I’ve been using it on my desk machine and on my iPhone, and I’m a fan; so if you like the idea of taking notes (via photo, sound recording, or text) anywhere and having those notes available anywhere, get yourself this app. You’ll be glad you did. . . . [more]