I have been working over the last few years on what I feel is a latent distinction within our concept of intellectual property. This distinction sets apart the properties produced in educational institutions from commercial properties. The “intellectual properties of learning,” as I term them, often have, if inconsistently, a distinct economic and legal status to them, whether in copyright or patent law, tax-exemption or incentive. The distinctions made around the public good of learning have a long history, dating back in the West, I am finding, to the medieval monasteries, but they hit the headlines last week.

On June . . . [more]

Legislation cracking down on crooked immigration consultants (Bill C-35) comes into force on June 30, 2011. At the same time, the...

Foolkit, which stands for Free Legal Toolkit, provides free comprehensive access to legal resources in every Australian state except Western Australia. Produced by an Adelaide lawyer named Andrew Rogers, it is a collection of resources for lawyers, support staff, law students and the general public. By some measures, Foolkit is one of the largest access to law websites in Australia. Foolkit gets over 2 million hits per month and Rogers estimates that it is used by about 20 percent of lawyers in Australia.

Foolkit’s goal for lawyers is to improve the efficiency and quality of practice and professional life. . . . [more]

A few weeks ago when the postal strike was looming I wondered if a strike might be a tipping point that leads to even less mail being sent. 

A Globe and Mail article says that has indeed been the case. The article says, for example, that 350,000 ING Direct customers have switched online in the past 2 weeks. The impact of that?

“Canada Post will lose at least $2,352,000 a year in revenue from ING Direct on stamps alone, assuming the company sends each of those 350,000 people one letter a month at the commercial price of $0.56 a stamp.” . . . [more]

Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) continues to be the buzzword, in Canada, US and the UK. 

This month’s edition of The Canadian Bar Association’s National Magazine features LPO on its cover page and a six page article on the topic. The article is titled “Bangalore Calling” and showcases a Canadian perspective on LPO.

Legal Week announced last month that Balfour Beatty, the construction giant, is planning to press its law firms on the topic of legal process outsourcing. According to the global general counsel and company secretary Chris Vaughan:

We are at the start of a process to review

. . . [more]

One of the saddest chapters of Bill Kaplan’s excellent biography Canadian Maverick – the Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand, is his account of Justice Rand’s post SCC appointment as the founding Dean of the University of Western Ontario’s Law School. Rand didn’t fit, was remote from students, and was ill at ease and isolated. {For further references see Omar’s post and Jamie Cameron’s review.]

A different challenge awaits the former chairman and chief executive officer of McCarthy Tétrault LLP., Iain Scott who will be moving to take over the deanship of Western in September. This . . . [more]

Following a rotating strike and a lockout, the Act to provide for the resumption and continuation of postal services (the “Act“) officially entered into force on Monday night. The Act ends the dispute between Canada Post and its 48,000 employees and imposes “final offer selection arbitration”. Everybody should have gotten some mail yesterday.
The law imposes specific salary increases for the years 2011 to 2014. Unlike all other provisions of the agreement, the parties cannot chose to agree to different salary levels and the arbitrator is bound to include them in the final collective agreement. It is interesting . . . [more]

Benefits of the media

They may be friendly, but they are not your friends. They are skilled, resourceful and tenacious. And most drink too much coffee. Not to suggest a sinister intention, but their job is get information from you — information you may not want to share — whether it serves you or your clients or not.

There is a unique synergy between you though. Sure, you may be at odds most of the time, but you can come together in a highly productive manner if prepared and with a healthy dose of caution. 

Strange bedfellows

If there’s anything . . . [more]

Well now all of us can start gauging our effectiveness via a growing number of websites that seek to place a quantitative assessment of your clout (or Klout as it may be) in social media circles.

The Canadian Blog Directory, by Mark Evans and Seth Singer, aims to create a directory of the thousands of Canadian blogs out there. Each blog is reviewed and has to meet a quality test, and the directory can be searched by name or subject. Since its launch, the project has added about 300 blogs.

Be sure to submit your own blog to make it that much easier for Canadians to find you. . . . [more]

Yesterday the United States Supreme Court delivered a 7-2 opinion about violent video games: Brown, Governor Of California, et al. v. Entertainment Merchants Association et al. [PDF]. Justice Scalia wrote the majority decision, in which it was decided that a California law prohibiting the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors is invalid as violating the first amendment protecting freedom of speech.

As might be expected, Scalia reviewed those restrictions on speech that have been supported by the courts, finding them in American traditions as spelled out in United States v. Stevens [PDF], a case concerning depiction of . . . [more]

Ubaka Ogbogu, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta is writing what I expect will be a very useful blog called Health Law in British North America. The blog is very new – there are only a couple of posts, but they lead to some interesting places in google books – historical statutes of Canada for example.

I like that the blog links to places I rarely visit:
British Library: Canadian Collections
History Matters
NLM:Medicine in the Americas, 1619-1920
SSRN Legal History Page

Professor Ogbogu’s teaching and research interests include health law, law and bioethics, law . . . [more]