This morning in a brief decision Canada’s top court ruled in a Reference that Internet service providers are not bound by the CRTC’s broadcast regulations

The judgment is so brief we quote it in full: . . . [more]

Having recently travelled to the UK and the US with my 3G/WiFi iPad 1 as my sole communication device, I thought I would pass on a few thoughts on travelling with an iPad.

1) Roaming Charges Using your Canadian 3G SimCard Outside of Canada: Since I tend to be stingy (not a good quality), I have never tested using my Canadian 3G access while abroad. However, comments from others suggest it can be very expensive.

2) WiFi not as Common as One Might Think: Depending on your hotel chain of choice, I find that free WiFi is not . . . [more]

The LegalTech 2012 Conference last week was a bit overwhelming for me as a first-time attendee.

As a knowledge management (KM) lawyer / law librarian, my continuing legal education opportunities tend to focus more on conferences related to KM or law libraries, such as the upcoming annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries / L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit held in Toronto in May.

However, I think it was worthwhile attending LegalTech, although I might not need to attend every year. The main difference for me was the large number of technology vendors exhibiting or presenting their . . . [more]

I spent last week at LegalTech in New York. It was a huge, thought provoking, intimidating, useful, connected, and intriguing experience. I was sent to the conference to investigate software in some specific market segments for my firm, and it was very useful for making connections with vendors and surveying the landscape of available products. There were very few librarians in the crowd.

The LegalTech experience could lead someone to believe that the most important technology function in our industry is eDiscovery. Predictive coding was another theme that bubbled to the surface multiple times along with cloud computing solutions.

Contrast . . . [more]

Library Boy told us last year about some tentative steps that courts were making to embrace – or to sniff around tentatively – the whole subject of social media. Today’s announcement from the UK Supreme Court that it will start official tweets of judgments – this in anticipation of the Assange extradition decision – represents the first wholesale adoption by a final court of appeal.

It overshadows Chief Justice McLachlin’s announcement within a speech at Carleton University on the Media and the Courts, that the Canadian judiciary should start to think seriously about social media.

See the Globe, the . . . [more]

Two weeks ago federal prosecutors in the US shut down MegaUpload, one of the most popular file-sharing sites on the Internet. The site was a widely-used “digital locker” that stored files for millions of users world-wide. Some of those users, however, used the side for illegitimate purposes, turning the site into a hub of what the US prosecutors characterized as “massive worldwide online piracy.”

While there’s no question large quantities of illegal, pirated material was successfully removed with the MegaUpload takedown, thousands of innocent users have lost access to their files as a result of the takedown. The legality . . . [more]

The Paris court of appeals has decided that a suggested search query generated by the Google Suggest function defamed the company whose name was first entered into the search box. This feature works by displaying the most popular searches performed by other Google searchers associated with the text typed into the search box. So Google doesn’t decide what is displayed; its machines just count and show.

Turns out that one of the most popular associations with the name of the plaintiff company was ‘escroc’, which in French means crook or swindler.

Is this a kind of ‘crowd-sourced’ defamation? What can . . . [more]

I have a tendency to want to keep my gravy out of my peas — control issues, I know. This makes me work to keep my social media in silos as much as possible, fearing, I suppose, the further loss of privacy if Facebook gossips to Twitter about me and vice versa. The devil — or the deity, if you prefer — is in the intersections, the linkages, the relationships.

This desire for some crafted anonymity or at least a tad of privacy is a forlorn hope, I realize, if I’m online and tweeting, blogging, “plus”-ing and the like, whether . . . [more]

I have the pleasure of attending LegalTech 2012 in New York this week. Though I came to NYC to talk to vendors of legal technology products as my primary purpose, there have been some interesting learning opportunities as well. One session I attended yesterday was titled “Talking Technology to Lawyers”.

The session was moderated by Gina Buser of Travelling Coaches. Panelists were all Chief Informatin Officers at large US law firms: Bob Dolinsky, Terry Pressley, and Kirk Scruggs. Thpugh their titles were the same, their approaches to speaking about technology to lawyers differed. My impression of the panelists was simplified . . . [more]

Who are these guys and why are they so happy? You’re looking at Clio co-founders Rian Gauvreau on the left and Jack Newton (Slaw blogger) on the right; and they’ll be smiling right now because they’ve just announced at Legal Tech that Clio has raised six million dollars in its Series B round of financing. From the Clio press release:

Clio will use this new funding to extend its product leadership position, aggressively developing new functionalities and supporting its growing customer base. In addition, the company aims to expand its footprint beyond the U.S. (which currently represents 95% of

After a 6 week break the Members of Parliament return to Ottawa today starting at 11 am ET. The Projected Order of Business mentions resumption of the debate over Bill C-25, Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act. CBC’s Kady O’Malley has her take on today’s proceedings over on the CBC website.

We are expecting a new Federal budget in the next few weeks. And according to CBC News Now, other major legislation that will be dealt with this session includes immigration, financial services review, copyright reform (Bill C-11), the omnibus crime bill (Bill C-10) and doing away with the long . . . [more]