Yesterday’s New York Times article Copyright Challenge for Sites that Excerpt by Brian Stelter explores the boundaries as to what is acceptable with regard to excerpting from news stories by other websites, and what is causing news publishers to become uncomfortable. When is it acceptable to quote the majority of an article in a blog post? Is it okay to take a whole RSS feed from a news source (which they are freely supplying), and republish it on a website with additional advertising?

It seems that it all depends on who is doing the republishing. Prominent free news aggregator Google . . . [more]

Over two years ago, Simon Chester noted,

75 percent of all traffic on the Internet is due to file sharing, with 59 percent of that file sharing attributed to people swapping video files. Music tracks account for 33 percent of the file-sharing traffic. E-mail, it turns out, accounts for just 9 percent of the total traffic.

Well it turns out that all that file sharing activity is not without risk.

Tiversa, a Pennsylvania-based company that monitors peer-to-peer file sharing, revealed this week that they found a transfer of military information from a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., to . . . [more]

The CanLII user group tour came to Calgary last night. It was a great opportunity for us westerners to see what is coming down the pike from the innovators at LexUM. Simon live blogged from the TO meeting and of course CanLII is often discussed here at Slaw, but I want to revisit one part of the new services currently in beta – CanLEX.

CanLEX is a a website which hosts some open APIs (application programming interface) that give tools for, among other things, automating links to the CanLII Reflex citator within a users documents. . . . [more]

Necessity breeds invention. From Procter & Gamble to IBM to Federal Express, from nylon to photocopiers to the electron microscope — some of the world’s most well-known companies and products were born in past recessions and depressions. The current economic crisis will be no exception — when times are tough, forward-thinking people will find ways to do things better. That applies especially to the practice of law.

Is your law practice or firm one of the profession’s leading lights of innovation? Have you or someone within your firm with vision and courage led a groundbreaking effort to practice law differently? . . . [more]

I’ve put together a website, LawTop, that uses Google News to bring you the most recent law-related stories from Canadian mainstream English-language news sources. You can choose whether to see 10, 25 or 50 of the latest stories, and whether you’d like the headlines only or the headlines and a brief excerpt. As I say on the main page, this is really a simple exercise because Google does all the heavy lifting — and the only reason you’d want to use LawTop instead of Google News directly is because LawTop’s got a handy and consistent set of terms to . . . [more]

If you were an early bird like me and on your computer circa 5:30-5:45 a.m. EST this morning, or on the other side of the world when this would be a reasonable time of the day, you too may have participated in the “Great Gmail outage of February 2009.”

Yes, Gmail was down, and mass panic ensued it what became commonly known as Gfail.

The hysteria could probably best be observed first hand on Twitter, where thousands of users, myself included, screamed in protest and paranoia.

@sandersonjones probably said it best,

Google, I know you’re listening.

As Slaw readers will know, one of the themes that recurs here quite frequently is the role of publishing and books in this culture of rapid technological change. Jason Epstein has a few thoughts on the matter, some of which he shared in the keynote at the recent O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2009 in New York. Epstein is someone you would very much want to listen to on the subject: now 81 years old, he created the Anchor Book imprint in the early 50s, launching the trade paper format; in 1963 he co-founded the New York Review . . . [more]

Over the years, legal users have seen their fair share of badly designed websites, pages whose very design obstructs access. The wayback machine can draw cringes when we look back at sites that looked wonderful at the time.

However, a piece in today’s Korea Times led me to a site that reaches a new level in this dubious competition.

At the outset, we must commend the South Korean government for recognizing the need for having legal information accessible in a language other than Korean – Korean users could always click here.

But this site is extraordinary when it . . . [more]

Brian Bowman (Pittblado, LLP) has a new blog — Brian Bowman – On the Cutting Edge — that’s been active since the beginning of the month. The blog:

provides practical assistance to Canadian businesses so they can better deal with issues related to privacy, access to information, online reputation management, intellectual property and technology legal matters.

Bowman is a Past Chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s National Privacy and Access Law Section. Welcome to the blogosphere, Brian.

[via Information Roundup] . . . [more]

There are some people — well, there used to be — who keep their notes in a notebook and keep their notebooks. (Some even pass them on to posterity.) But that was then, and, Moleskine notwithstanding, this is now. Paper may be passé, the urge to note, however, is still with us; and because the brain is no larger than it once was, despite all the pushing this way and that from importunate data, notes must be recorded externally somehow. I use scraps of paper left strategically in key places, post-its glued at eye level, Stickies on my . . . [more]

While it’s mainly an American based survey there’s much of interest in the latest ILTA Survey of Corporate Law Departments.

I was surprised that

Word 2003 still dominates word processing

Sharepoint hasn’t been widely deployed

Most corporate law departments have had experience coping with electronic discovery

Knowledge management doesn’t seem to be of interest to most corporate law departments

There appears to be ample opportunity for creative technological exchange between law firms and their clients . . . [more]

I expect that the needs of lawyers are somewhat different from the general public when it comes to the websites of public bodies, particularly those of regulators and tribunals. What got me thinking about it was a solicitation to provide feedback on the British Columbia Information and Privacy Commissioner’s website as they embark on a refresh or redesign.

I assume that when most public bodies are thinking about their websites, they look at how to make it useful for the general public. Which is obviously important, but I know that I’m a heavy user of a number of government websites . . . [more]