Our congratulations to Public.Resource.Org a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. Today it won a $2 million award from Google’s Project 10¹⁰⁰ competition – 10¹⁰⁰ is 1 googol – which called for “ideas to change the world”.

Google’s competition garnered 150,000 ideas from more than 170 countries. Google whittled that list down to a final 16 ideas for public vote. Public Resource came in second equal, after FIRST a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition.

The Law.Gov initiative aims to make . . . [more]

The way we communicate has been steadily shifting away from telephone calls to e-mail, instant messaging, Skype, BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook, and other Internet-based communication methods. This shift has been bad news for more than just telcos; the difficulty of wiretapping the myriad of cloud-based communication methods has become an increasing cause of frustration for law enforcement agencies around the world.

That may be about to change. The New York Times reports that the FBI, NSA, US Justice Department and other agencies are seeking extensive new regulations that will significantly bolster law enforcement’s ability to wiretap Internet-based communications. Internet-based services such . . . [more]

You simply must see this video of Switzerland’s finance minister collapsing in a fit of giggles as he struggles through a bunch of bureaucratic language about the importation of cured meats.

It is truly the only way to respond to a whole lot of awful writing. This is one guy I’d like to see in our Parliament.

. . . [more]

Based in Halifax, NS, the Centre for Law and Democracy is a non-profit organization that

promotes respect for those human rights which serve as the foundation of democracy. This includes the right to information, the right to participate and to vote, freedom of expression, and the rights to assembly and association. CLD specialises in providing legal and policy expertise on these rights globally.

If your work touches on human rights, you’ll find some useful material here. There are published papers and reports (e.g. “Hate Speech Rules Under International Law, February 2010“) and a section on Legal Work, containing . . . [more]

I was speaking with a colleague recently regarding whether mediation was a valuable tool in outsourcings, and if so, under what circumstances. We came to the conclusion that it is an appropriate tool for some outsourcings, but not all. 

It is inevitable in any outsourcing or large managed services arrangement that disputes will arise. Disputes arise for a myriad of reasons, ranging from a failure of the parties to appreciate and agree on fundamental business terms, such as differences of opinion on specifications or deliverables, to perhaps the more mundane question of whether a notice required by the agreement was . . . [more]

The Canadian Press is reporting that they have accessed an internal report which indicates that the real impact of Bill C-25 – An Act to Amend the Criminal Code, may be felt unevenly. Specifically, those in rural communities and Aboriginals may bear the brunt of the legal reforms.

The Bill, also known as the “Truth in Sentencing Act,” forces judges to impose 1-for-1 time for credit in pre-trial custody, unless written explanation is provided otherwise. For a number of reasons judges had previously been allowed to provide more credit for pre-trial custody, in practical recognition of the poorer conditions, . . . [more]

I’ve been distracted today by a book that arrived in the morning mail: Frederick Vaughan, Viscount Haldane: ‘The Wicked Step-father of the Canadian Constitution’ (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History / University of Toronto Press, 2010)(LAC Amicus no. 38031823)(UTP pid no. 2758). For those not familiar with the name, this is from pages xv and xvi of the introduction:

It is fair to say that no jurist in our history has received so much learned abuse as Viscount Haldane of Cloan. Twenty years after his death, he received a scholarly tongue-lashing from the late chief

The New York State Bar Association has decided that it is ethical for lawyers to gather information on adverse parties in litigation from publicly accessible social media pages of those parties. Lawyers are not allowed to ‘friend’ the adverse parties, or have anyone else do so. (This is consistent with the Philadelphia Bar opinion from last year.)

A story about the Philadelphia Bar view is here (the Bar’s own site is currently down for maintenance).

Here’s how the press characterized the NY State ruling: “Lawyers may comb social media for dirt”. Does that strike you as fair?

What would we . . . [more]

I often think that the only truly harmless thing that human beings do together is the making of music. If I include dancing as well, then I’ve embraced the two videos I offer you today, each of which shows how much pleasure we can get and give in groups, and will, I hope, delight you.

The first relies on surprise and incongruity: you’re at a big city train terminal, hustling on in your daily commute when:

The expressions on the faces of the onlookers are something wonderful to see.

The second is surprising because it makes use of technology to . . . [more]

Here’s a great article in the Boston Globe about what happens to the books of famous authors (also, not so famous authors). It is pretty much what happens to everyone’s books: they get dispersed, re-read, sometimes re-assembled…

Its a great intro. to some of the qualities of books that are well known by every bibliophile, librarian and book historian, but not well known for most people who fall somewhere in between: the social value of books, their virus-like valences, and their unique physicality. Plus, you get to see some of the book world realities that drive books from hand to . . . [more]

This is just a reminder that the early bird deadline is on September 28 for the upcoming IT-Can conference.

From the their brochure [PDF]:

The 14th Annual IT.CAN conference will be held at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal on October 28-29, 2010. The program is regarded as the premiere Information Technology Law Conference in Canada as it offers a wide array of up to the minute IT Law topics presented by some of the leading practitioners from across the country. The program is very reasonably priced and should be attended by anyone who practices significantly in the area of . . . [more]

Zotero has announced that it will be releasing a standalone desktop version of the program that will integrate with Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome. At the present, Zotero is only an extension to the Firefox browser.

Zotero is a free note-taking application much favoured by researchers and others who need to clip, annotate, and organize material from the web along with bibliographic metadata. Zotero comes with a variety of bibliographic and citation styles built in (though not, I think, the Canadian legal citation format).

This move will make Zotero Everywhere a sensible alternative to other popular note-taking tools, such as . . . [more]