On Slaw we’ve pointed you to TED videos from time to time, and quite rightly: TED is a cornucopia of stimulating ideas. But here in Ontario we’ve got an online collection of thought-provoking videos that are equally worth your time. TVO offers up fifty or so excerpts from the last couple of years of its programming under the title of Big Ideas. Herewith a more or less random selection of these videos, just to give you an idea of what’s in store, if you’re shopping:

• Sara Seager on Exoplanets the Search for Habitable Worlds
• Simon Winchester on Joseph Needham,

. . . [more]

As service provider’s counsel, I watched it happen many times. After the Service Provider worked diligently to prepare a response to a Customer RFP and was down-selected based on the Service Provider’s proposed solution, the scope of services was reduced. The reasons varied. Sometimes they were financial: the Customer was not able to afford particular aspects of the solution or the benefits arising from parts of the solution no longer justified the expense. In other cases the reasons were operational or delivery-based: the Customer lacked the necessary infrastructure to implement components of the solution or it would have taken the . . . [more]

Following up on Dave Bilinsky’s post earlier this month, the BC distance family mediation project at Mediate BC has launched a new blog.

Located at distancemediation.ca, Susanna Jani’s goal is to provide more insights surrounding the project, and (of interest to me) reflections on how different technologies can support the families and mediators when they aren’t in the same room. As the project moves forward, regardless of whether one’s interests are in the area of mediation or technology, the insights provided should prove interesting to Slaw readers. . . . [more]

While the punishment appears for the moment to have been postponed, there is another horrible, barbarous story out of Iran. This time it’s not the stoning of a woman but the deliberate blinding of a man. He is alleged to have blinded a woman by throwing acid in her face when she spurned his advances. A Iranian court has now decided to order that he be blinded in return.

While there was a (justified) international outcry over the threat that a woman would be stoned, there has been none—at least that I’m aware of—over this latest barbarity. The man should, . . . [more]

On May 11, 2011, Manitoba proposed Canada’s first adult abuse registry as well as tough new offences and penalties to better protect adults with intellectual disabilities. The registry would make the names of those who abuse or neglect vulnerable adults under any Act available to employers for screening potential employees or volunteers. Similar registries already exist in the United States.

The Law via the Internet 2011 International Conference will be held at the University of Hong Kong on June 9 and 10. This will be the eleventh international gathering of promoters of free access and innovation in legal publishing.

This year’s meeting will give a new opportunity to assess if Free Access to Law is here to stay? The published program seems to reveal expansion. No one can say for sure about the long term sustainability of free access, but after 20 years the number of countries where the approach is used continues to increase. The growth is especially important . . . [more]

PBS has a new 13 minute video called High Fiber that looks at broadband in the Netherlands and Britain, and compares it to the US. The differences are striking. 

In Canada, we have controversies over usage based billing, and the costs of both basic internet services and fees for going over the monthly limit. And various surveys put us on a downward path in international rankings for various broadband metrics. This recent OECD survey, for example. 

The video shows that in the Netherlands and Britain more fiber is being installed (including to the home), competition is increasing, speeds are . . . [more]

As recently announced, Carlos Rossel, Publisher, The World Bank, is guiding the transition of the Bank’s print publishing to largely electronic, open access publishing. As part of this transition, The World Bank invited several of its employees including editors, economists, researchers, lawyers and invited non-Bank guests to a two-hour session yesterday in Washington, DC.

Carlos opened the session introducing the issues and speakers. I then gave an overview of relevant copyright and licensing/contractual issues relating to OA publishing. The information I provided was based on U.S. law as well as international copyright principles from the leading copyright treaty, the  . . . [more]

The UK government commissioned a review of intellectual property policy back in November of last year. The report [PDF] of commission chair Professor Ian Hargreaves was released today, making:

…

10 recommendations designed to ensure that the UK has an IP framework best suited to supporting innovation and promoting economic growth in the digital age.

A significant thrust and recommendation of the Hargreaves Report is that policy must be made on the basis of actual evidence, principally economic evidence, rather than the urgings of lobbyists as has been too often the case. The Commission considered adopting the American “Fair . . . [more]

Regular readers of my SLAW column will know that, while I’m an ardent supporter of initiatives that enhance the efficiency of our criminal justice system, I am also a regular critic of how that same system deals with the deluge of domestic-related charges that clog our courts on a daily basis. For these very reasons, a promising new pilot project has recently caught my attention.

The Integrated Domestic Violence Court (IDV) has ambitious plans to combine cases from two of Toronto’s busiest courthouses: the criminal courts of The Old City Hall and the family courts housed at 311 Jarvis Street. . . . [more]

Can the owner of a web site accessible on the public internet refuse to allow some other person to post a link to that site, identifying whose site it is? Can the owner of the site insist that the person who wants to post the link enter into a licence agreement?

Does it make a difference to the answer if the person who wants to post a link wants to identify the site in part by the use of the principal trade mark (or logo, more likely) registered by the owner of the site? Or would it be cleaner for . . . [more]

When I started working about 15 years ago, I was paid about slightly above minimum wage, at $6.90 per hour. I worked at large clothing retailer, folding khakis and giving on advice on whether or not a customer looked best in “boot cut” or “loose fit” jeans. Since those halcyon denim days, I have noticed a steady and continual increase in the minimum wage rate in Québec.

Indeed, as the Commission des Normes de Travail helpfully outlines on its site, minimum wage has been steadily progressing from its institution at $4.35 per hour in 1986. As of May 1, . . . [more]