The 2012 Law Via the Internet conference took place Oct 7-9, 2012 at the Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, New York.

The conference brings together people from the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) from different countries and continents that together form the Free Access to Law Movement.

Many of the presentations are already online.

Three Australian scholars who took part in the conference, Andrew Mowbray, Philip Chung, and Graham Greenleaf, published an interesting overview of the Free Access to Law concept. Their paper, The Meaning of ‘Free Access to Legal Information’: A Twenty Year Evolution, is available on . . . [more]

Yesterday, my partner Anne-Sylvie Vassenaix-Paxton gave a talk to ALAI Canada (L’Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale) on the impact the new French HADOPI laws no. 1 and 2, have had on peer to peer file sharing and protection of personal data under French law.

The acronym stands for the Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet (HADOPI), a body which co-ordinates a variety of legal measures against illegal downloading including sanctions against parents of downloaders.

Two points are interesting from a North American perspective. The French Constitutional Council threw out a draft of . . . [more]

Virtual delight echoed in tweets, posts, and emails in my corner of the web late Wednesday, upon the release of Judge Baer’s opinion in Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust 11 CV 6351 (S.D.N.Y.). Very shortly after its release, Prof. James Grimmelmann posted the opinion on Scribd.

Briefly, for those unfamiliar, the plaintiffs and defendants had each sought summary judgment in respect of the plaintiffs’ copyright infringement claim. HathiTrust and related university defendants saw near-entire success in their summary judgment motions, failing only on a standing question not consequential to the result. The outcome: Fair use protects the defendants’ participation . . . [more]

We all should do more to protect our social media accounts from being compromised. On an almost daily basis you hear about a celebrity that has had their account or smartphone hacked – and no doubt – there are thousands of otherwise anonymous non-celebrities that suffer the same fate each and every day.
So what can you do to protect yourself? Yes, a stronger password is a start, but there is a lot more you can do. A ReadWriteWeb post I came across today has a fantastic infographic that does a great job of explaining the basics of social media . . . [more]

Here’s a neat graphic summarizing the many ways in which social media interrupts us and erodes productivity, based, I think, on this Microsoft study. Conveniently, there’s an app for that. . . . [more]

Microsoft has announced that its new Internet Explorer 10 browser will block the tracking of users’ browsing records by advertisers. There will be a ‘do not track’ command that will be turned on by default, though users can turn it off.

According to this Outlaw.com story, the American Association of National Advertisers has complained about this. Tracking, it says, allows for advertising better targeted to users’ interests, thus more likely to be effective, thus more lucrative for the advertisers, thus providing more money to support the ‘free’ content on the Internet. Blocking tracking by default ‘takes the information out . . . [more]

The Sixteenth Annual Canadian Information Technology Law Association (“IT.CAN”) Conference will be held in Montreal on October 29-30.

IT.CAN has 350 members from across the country who are concerned with IT law. The annual conference is the organization’s major event to help attendees stay current in this rapidly developing area of law.

The full conference brochure including registration details is available on the IT.CAN website. If you have any questions about the program, get in touch with Lisa Ptack, IT.CAN Executive Director at lisa.ptack@rogers.com. . . . [more]

The release of the iPhone 5 has seen hundreds of reviews flood the web. The consensus? The iPhone 5 is amazing. It is both thinner and lighter than the iPhone 4S, all while delivering a larger, more vivid screen coupled with an even better 8MP camera. The bad? Apple Maps is the most half-baked piece of software Apple has released since MobileMe.

For lawyers on the go, the iPhone 5 offers a compelling new feature that most reviews mention only in passing: LTE support. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is a new wireless data standard, and offers speeds in excess . . . [more]

In this Clay Shirky talk at TED Global, he describes how democratic principles of freedom of expression and engaged citizenship can be enabled online by the use of “distributed version control”, or software that allows “collaboration without coordination.” This is a funny and thought provoking talk, urging people to seek, as he puts it, not only a dashboard from their governments, but also a steering wheel.

The main barrier to this development is expressed concisely in this image:

. . . [more]

I enjoyed reading Philip Roth’s “Open Letter to Wikipedia,” published earlier this month in The New Yorker‘s Page Turner blog, from which flowed amendments to a Wikipedia entry.

In quick summary, as I understand events: Mr. Roth read a Wikipedia entry on his The Human Stain. He noticed “a serious misstatement” about the inspiration of the story. He petitioned Wikipedia for correction of the entry on his novel. Correction was not immediately granted. The New Yorker published Mr. Roth’s Open Letter. This letter recounted Wikipedia’s explanation that Mr. Roth, the author, “was not a credible source: . . . [more]

The maker of electric cars Tesla has announced that it will be upgrading the computer systems in their cars over the air, i.e. by wireless connection built into the car. This will be a mandatory upgrade, no doubt to avoid liability if any defect being cured by the upgrade caused damage to someone who had not yet installed it.

Is this a problem, at least potentially? Are car owners going to run into digital rights management (DRM) and technical protection measure (TPM) problems? As one commentator asked, if Apple complains about Ford’s driver/car interface, will Ford have to remove features . . . [more]

Right to Know Week is an international event started in Bulgaria in 2002. Its purpose is “to raise awareness about people’s right to access government information while promoting freedom of information as essential to both democracy and good governance.”

In Canada, events across the country are posted on the website http://www.righttoknow.ca/.

Last week I was fortunate to attend a run-up event to Right to Know Week called Open Data, Big Data, Yes…but NOT Personal Data, put together jointly by the Toronto Board of Trade and Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian. She encourages public institutions to . . . [more]