On June 14th, the non-profit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre launched an online portal on Business & Children.

The Portal covers issues such as child labour, dangerous products, education, forced labour, pollution damaging health, pregnancy discrimination, sexual exploitation and trafficking. The content comes from many sources including NGOs, international organizations such as UNICEF and the ILO, governments, journalists, academics, and companies themselves. It features responses by companies to allegations of misconduct as well as positive initiatives they, NGOs and other organizations have taken to protect the rights of children.

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre tracks the . . . [more]

From a CBC story

A website that lets people check whether their email addresses, usernames and passwords have been stolen in a cyberattack and posted online has been launched by an Australian who is a former IT security consultant.

This new website, shouldichangemypassword.com, allows concerned internet users to enter an email address and see whether it appears in stolen information posted online by groups such as Lulz Security. If an email is listed in the database of stolen data, the site will list what information among your email, username and password have been compromised, how many times it has . . . [more]

Since the economic burden of mental illnesses in Canada has been estimated at $51-billion per year, with almost $20-billion of that coming from workplace losses, the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) has launched a collaborative project with the Bureau de normalisation du Québec (BNQ) and the standards division of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA Standards) to create a voluntary national standard for mentally healthy workplaces. The standard aims to help Canadian employers support the psychological health and safety of their employees. According to the government, Canada is the first country in the world to develop such a standard.

E-books and e-readers are constant topics of discussion. Every new device released results in a flurry of activity; one only needs to think of the recent press around the new iPad 2 and the Blackberry PlayBook. Tablets and iPads are frequent topics here on Slaw. And in May, Amazon reported that since April 1, 2011, sales of Kindle books had exceeded the sale of print books. 

When I was at CALL recently, a show of hands indicated that more than half the audience owned at least one e-reader. Everyone I spoke with was enthusiastic about their e-reader or tablet of . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada recently released its decision in the case of Masterpiece v Alvida which clarified some trade-mark issues, particularly on the issue of confusion.

Here are some notes from an IT-Can roundtable conference call from today that discussed the case. Presenters were Kelly Gill of Gowling, Lafleur Henderson LLP, Clarke Hunter of Macleod Dixon LLP and Brandon Potter of Macleod Dixon LLP.

The issue in the case essentially related to the use by different parties of “Masterpiece Living” vs “Masterpiece the Art of Living”, and whether they are confusing.

The main issues:

Is it relevant that the . . . [more]

(This article is based on a talk that I gave at this year’s Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference.)

With online services accounting for an ever-increasing percentage of libraries’ budgets, it is important to be able to keep an eye on the usage of these services. Fortunately, a number of these online services offer usage reports. These reports allow the account administrators to get a clearer picture of how these services are used and how to get the most out of them.

Where to get usage reports

The availability of usage reports varies greatly from publisher to publisher, and . . . [more]

Canadian and American courts (and others) have been making pronouncements about the reliability of electronic documents for various purposes, not all of them equally persuasive, and the Canadian ones more sceptical than the American courts — perhaps only because of the facts before them.

Comments welcome on any of these cases: were they rightly decided? Do they suggest gaps in legislation? . . . [more]

Outlook 2010, I love you, I think. Yesterday I attended an internal training class that introduced me to Outlook 2010. This is one of the beginning steps (from the user perspective) of a renovation, evolution, revamp, revision of our firms desktop software. From the perspective of our IT department, this is the mid-point in a long line of projects that will culminate in current Office Suite software for our firm’s users.

Since other Slawyers may be going down (moving up?) this particular software update road, I am sharing a couple of my Outlook 2010 experiences. Note that we jumped from . . . [more]

Simon Fraser University's Masters of Arts in Applied Legal Studies has received a 2011 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education. The prestigious award was presented at the CAUCE national conference recently held in Toronto to John Whatley, the CODE program director. Dr. Whately received the award on behalf of SFU’s School of Criminology, Centre for Online and Distance Education (CODE) and, in particular, all the people responsible for the design, implementation and continuing delivery of the program.

Last week I asked if Apple’s forthcoming iCloud service spells doom for Dropbox. My conclusion was no, iCloud does not pose a critical threat to Dropbox, but this week I’m worried about a new threat to Dropbox’s viability: Dropbox themselves.

Yesterday Dropbox disclosed a “bug” they’d introduced that allowed users to log into any Dropbox account using an arbitrary password. That is, if you have a Dropbox account, all a potential hacker would have to know was your e-mail address, and he would have unfettered access to your entire Dropbox.

Although the impact of the bug on users was . . . [more]

A new law came into effect yesterday: the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act, S.C. 2010, c. 21 (the “Act”).

While the definition of a consumer product is quite broad (according to s. 2 of the Act, it is “a product, including its components, parts or accessories, that may reasonably be expected to be obtained by an individual to be used for non-commercial purposes, including for domestic, recreational and sports purposes, and includes its packaging”), a number of goods are already excluded from this legislation under Schedule 1, products which are already covered by another piece of legislation. Such consumer . . . [more]

We’ve once again reached a remarkable point as the world wobbles on. Today — at 1.16 p.m. to be precise — is the solstice. Up here in the Northern Hemisphere it’s the summer solstice; for the folks South of the equator, it’s the winter solstice, of course: the longest and the shortest day of the year, respectively. And because we often remark on Google Doodles here on Slaw, I thought I might point out that today it’s a Google Twoodle, the particular one depending on where you find yourself, both being the work of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami:

The . . . [more]