North American courts are not really sure what to do about web scraping, where someone uses automation to take information in bulk from a web site and puts it on his/her/its own site in competition with the original site. Sometimes (but not often) doing this is held to be trespass to chattels. More often it has been held to violate the terms of use of the victim site, even if those terms are ‘webwrap’, i.e. never explicitly consented to. (In fact, it is freakishly rare for webwrap conditions to be upheld except against scrapers).

The federal court in Illinois recently . . . [more]

Twitter has started giving its users the option to accept direct messages (DMs) from anyone who follows them. In the past, only mutual follow relationships had the DM feature available.

Located under the first settings tab in your profile, the option looks like this:

Why would twitter do this? All Things D suggests that the network is getting set for an overhaul to their DM functionality. Dan Pinnington correctly adds that this might be a new opportunity for abuse by spammers. Both responses are likely correct.

Personally, I’m curious about what Twitter’s future direction for DMs will be. Because, . . . [more]

As we’ve discussed a number of times on Slaw, a good many hyperlinks break over time as their targets get moved or taken down. This link rot is particularly challenging in academia and in law, where cited authorities are an important component of one’s argument.

In a 16 page document available on SSRN three weeks ago, “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations,” Harvard professors Jonathan Zittrain and Kendra Albert:

. . . document a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review

. . . [more]

Reproduced in the September 2013 issue of LAWPRO Magazine is a sample of the report we get when a lawyer reports a claim using our online claim report form. It is a classic textbook example of a bad cheque fraud where the lawyer was duped. Upon discovering these frauds, banks generally reverse the credit that was given on the deposit of the fake cheque. Because the lawyer already disbursed funds in reliance on the fake cheque, this reversal removes trust funds belonging to other clients and/or leaves the lawyer’s trust account with a negative balance.

Please read the claim report . . . [more]

It has been held in a US case that allegations made in comments on blog posts are not sufficiently reliable to be used in cross-examination. In this case an expert was testifying in a product liability case that the defendant’s products had never caught fire before (as the plaintiff’s had). The plaintiff’s counsel wanted to point to a number of comments in blogs about fires in some of the same manufacturer’s products. The court denied the right to use those examples.

Is that right? How much reliability do you need? Are blog comments the cross-examiner’s Wikipedia? (It was not suggested . . . [more]

ICANN has been busy dealing with applications for new gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains). There are currently 22 TLDs (.com, .net, .org …) but the number of TLDs is about to explode with the first showing up later this year. Despite a hefty application fee of $180,000, ICANN received 1930 applications for new TLDs. Agreements signed recently include .menu, .land, ventures.

The thought of having hundreds if not thousands of TLDs is concerning to some brands, who fear that opportunists will try to scoop their brand names on some of these TLDs. 

For a complete listing of new TLDs in . . . [more]

Both Google and Yahoo! have run into litigation (class actions) in the US for allegedly looking at (inspecting, reviewing, mining) information in emails carried over their free email services, gmail.com and yahoo.com. It is not alleged that any human being is opening the mail and reading it. It’s all about automated review in order to test the interests of the senders and perhaps recipients, for marketing purposes.

Would such activity be prohibited under PIPEDA in Canada too? Is that ‘collecting personal information’? Is the type of information being collected actually PI or PII?

Any use made of the information . . . [more]

Last Friday I attended a symposium on alternative business structures (ABS — and not to be confused with anti-lock braking systems, American Bureau of Shipping, the absolute value of a number regardless of its sign, etc.) hosted by the Law Society of Upper Canada. I hope that over the next few days, I and a couple of other Slawyers who were there, can fill you in on some of the interesting stuff that we heard (though I’m happy to say that broadly speaking none of it would have been news to a dedicated reader of Slaw). But today I want . . . [more]

The baby panda cam at Washington’s National Zoo is not the only digital casualty of the shutdown of U.S. federal government services that started this week [awwww man, not the cam with the adorable baby panda!].

The websites of Library of Congress and the Law Library of Congress, the world’s largest law library, are also down, although THOMAS, the legislative information site is still functioning.

Even NASA’s website is knocked out of commission.

The Washington Post, the Ars Technica site, and the government transparency NGO the Sunlight Foundation have details. . . . [more]

The CBA Futures Initiative took to the Twitterverse Tuesday night to talk about legal education.

What was supposed to be a half-hour discussion about objectives and obstacles turned into more than two hours of enthusiastic participation from across the country. Mitch Kowalski summed up the responses about 75 minutes in: “So we’ve seen tuition, diversity, maturity, practicality, length of study are issues. Solutions?”

Karen Dyck summed up the legal profession’s response to these issues so far with an emoticon wink: “Don’t change a thing.”

A lot of the early discussion focused on high and rising tuition costs, in response to . . . [more]

BrightPlanet has created a new online product called “BlueJay,” which it is advertising as a "Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner." The tool allows users to monitor virtually every single public tweet published by Twitter users in real time for indicators of crime or wrongdoing. Users can set up virtual perimeters or geo-fences to track tweets specific to those areas. BrightPlanet’s main business is “open source intelligence”: searching the “deep web”—those parts of the World Wide Web that are public but which regular search engines cannot reach.

Aka Phantom Cellphone Vibration – when you think you feel your phone vibrating when it is not. Yes, this is a real thing that has been the subject of academic studies.

From a study at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, United States entitled Phantom vibrations among undergraduates: Prevalence and associated psychological characteristics:

Phantom vibration syndrome,’ or perceived vibrations from a device that is not really vibrating, is a recent psychological phenomenon that has attracted the attention of the media and medical community. Most (89%) of the 290 undergraduates in our sample had experienced phantom vibrations, and they experienced them . . . [more]