From cbcnews.ca (June 12, 2008):

The federal government has introduced legislation to make it easier to prosecute people who download copyrighted material from the internet.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice tabled amendments to the Copyright Law in the House of Commons Thursday. Individuals caught downloading copyrighted files would be fined $500 under the proposed amendments. The current copyright law — intended to catch commercial cheaters — carries a maximum fine of $20,000 for infringements.

The bill has been in limbo since the Conservatives first put it on the Commons order paper in December. Prentice was caught between business interests who wanted

Even though I’ve got an iPod Touch, I’m still casting an acquistive eye in the direction of the iPhone, now that it’s coming to Canada. (…at usage rates that will doubtless be some multiple of the U.S. rate of about $70 for voice and data, but that’s another story…) But, not being a BlackBerry person and not having to be in constant touch with a firm wherever I am, I’m unclear about the various modalities of wireless communication now literally floating around. The new version of the iPhone boasts that it’s 3G, of course, and so I was really glad . . . [more]

This is pretty cool: give Lingro a URL and it hotlinks every word on that page to a dictionary, and it offers you the ability to translate the word you’re looking up into one of a number of other languages. As you can see below, I gave it the current home page on Slaw, clicked on “superior” and asked for a French translation. This would be really helpful I imagine if you were reading a text in a language with which you weren’t very familiar and needed to get the definition for a lot of words.

There’s review of Lingro . . . [more]

Today Ontario Superior Court Justice David McCombs made his final ruling allowing all media–television and internet alike–access to a tape of an interview with Paul Bernardo.

The video, running 31 minutes, shows Bernardo being questioned in a Kingston, Ontario jail on June 7, 2007 about the murder of Elizabeth Bain. Bernardo was not originally considered a suspect in her death, but some lawyers believe he should have been. Robert Baltovich was convicted of Bain’s murder in 1992.

The tape was meant to be evidence in Baltovich’s court case this past April, but was never played. According to the CBC website: . . . [more]

At the WWDC keynote address by Apple earlier today, an updated version of the iPhone was released. Steve Jobs is informally calling it “iPhone 2.0”, and a video of customers who beta tested the mobile phone is included in the usual slick keynote video.

This time around, U.S.-based firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP beta tested the phone for two months. One of the features of the updated iPhone is the new integration with Microsoft Exchange so that firms and other PC-centric organizations can have push email, scheduling and contacts from Microsoft Outlook.

Will the iPhone overtake the upcoming Blackberry . . . [more]

Summer students at Cassels Brock in Toronto are breaking new ground by writing a blog this summer. What a fantastic idea. It shows the everyday life of summer law students on Bay Street for those who have not yet embarked on law school. It is also a great way for summer students not at this particular firm to compare notes.

According to a news release from Cassels Brock:

“This is the first student-run blog devoted to capturing the Cassels Brock summer experience,” noted Leigh-Ann McGowan, Practice Support Lawyer, Cassels Brock. “The blog was named, developed and is maintained by the

Akamai, the company that the big providers — Adobe, CBC, Cognos… — use to distribute their content on the internet, has released a report on the state of the internet [PDF]. They handle billions of transactions each day all over the globe (“Akamai routinely delivers between ten and twenty percent of all web traffic…”) and so their traffic data put them in a really good position to know about the comings and goings of packets.

Canada appears but once in the report: We’re tenth in the world when it comes to internet penetration (as measured by unique IP . . . [more]

Digital Research Tools (DiRT)

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

I like the way the table . . . [more]

My post about Google’s new favicon got me thinking: do law firms use favicons, and if so, how good are they?

A completely unscientific survey of “quite a few” firm websites tells me that only a small minority of law firms make use of this branding opportunity — and those that do have, by and large, really weak favicons.

Herewith five that I came up with:

This is a weak one. It’s the Cassels logo, seen to the right, in miniature. But at 16 x 16 pixels, the thing just doesn’t translate well: the shape is unclear and the colours

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]

Following along from last month’s exchanges at the Writers’ Union, a couple of interesting speculative pieces on what technology will do to book publishing and to libraries.

The Economist has a piece this week from Book Expo America on Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry
. I liked the last line, which echoes what I said to the Writers’ Union:

Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.

But . . . [more]

A friend raises an interesting question for the Slaw community:

Imagine that you have a ten person lawyer firm (+ support staff) that needs to move to matter-centric DM. What choices would such a firm have, other than the conventional (and somewhat pricey) legal DM vendors (i.e. OpenText and Interwoven), whose work is good but doesn’t quite scale this small.

Does anyone know whether there is a matter-centric DM based on open source or web services, keeping in mind standard law firm security and confidentiality requirements. Does anyone have any novel ideas or suggestions? . . . [more]