Luxury good maker Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH), who produces Moet & Chandon champagne and Dior perfume, claimed that Google’s advertising polices violated their trademark. The practice in question was the use of key words related to brand names by counterfeiters, who would then link to online stores.

Based on reported coverage of the case, the European Court of Justice made several main findings in a decision released this morning:

1. Google has not infringed copyright simply for allowing companies to purchase trade mark key words
2. Google cannot be liable for advertising requests if it removes them when informed that

Amanda Ellis notes that some Big Law firms in the U.S. are using LinkedIn for recruiting lawyers,

I always glance at the jobs section but today was the first day I remember seeing three attorney positions posted by a firm – not to mention a large firm. Usually, the openings in this section include in-house positions and/or legal support positions.

Are more law firms posting attorney job openings on LinkedIn? Possibly. Should law students and lawyers review LinkedIn’s job postings? Absolutely.

Although earlier this month Wendy Reynolds recommended here on Slaw job searchers use LinkedIn, do we have any evidence . . . [more]

This Week in Biotech was notable for the passage of comprehensive health reform legislation in the U.S. The bill will have major ramifications for coverage, cost, and insurance markets South of the 49th. It will also have global implications for biotech and pharma companies, shaping two major industry trends:

First, the bill includes a 12-year exclusivity period for new biologic drugs. The EU and Canada have chosen to provide only 6 years’ protection, as discussed in a post on Health Canada’s finalized Guidance Document this week. Because these drugs are complex to begin with, there is a high . . . [more]

We haven’t discussed the joint US/UK Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access which last week published its final report titled “Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information”.

This is the most sustained attempt to deal with the long-term problem of data deluge to ensure that researchers and scholars in the future can access our knowledge heritage in the same way that can now be done at the Bodleian or the Library of Congress.

The size of our stock of digital knowledge doubles in less than two years. This is a . . . [more]

A law library is central to a law school.

Pretty unarguable proposition I would have thought.

Students have to have a library to learn. Faculty to teach and write.

That’s why I can’t understand the story told in the Queen’s Journal this week under the headline Future uncertain for law library.

Like many universities, Queen’s has had to make regular operational budget cuts. But Queen’s isn’t a tiny school and serving the needs of 30 full-time law faculty and about 500 law students, can’t be easily done with the six and a half full-time staff at the Lederman Law . . . [more]

The screen capture below is a portion of my Law Society of Upper Canada’s 2009 form for lawyer annual reports. It’s from the non-mandatory section collecting demographic information. 

. . . [more]

As of noon today Google will no longer censor the results of searches with Google Search, Google News, and Google Images on Google.cn. According to the Official Google Blog:

Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.

In introducing this move, Google gave prominence to the attacks on its site within China, and only secondarily referred to “attempts to . . . limit free speech.” As Google points out in this announcement, . . . [more]

For what it’s worth — and it can’t be very much at 16 pixels square — CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute, has a favicon. It may have been up there for months and I’ve only now noticed it, of course. But if so, you may not have noticed it either, so I thought I’d show it to you — at twice the size you’d actually see it at: — rather than that used by the other legal information institutes, AustLII, WorldLII, and BaiLII respectively:

We’ve posted about these inconsequential artworks before on Slaw: Law Firm Favicons, Google’s . . . [more]

In catching up on the news about the progress of the US health care bill, I was interested in the mix of media that provided the news. Notably, the Google News page on US House passes healthcare reform shows an interesting mix of media (click on image for a larger view):

In addition to news stories from a range of sources, I note the Barack Obama quote pulled out (was this automatically generated after being repeated by numerous sources?), and the time line with list of stories on the right. Scrolling further down on the page reveals additional related photos . . . [more]

Pharmaceutical companies are heavily regulated in the manner in which they can advertise to consumers. And for good reason – drugs are highly effective in addressing medical conditions, but also potentially dangerous when used improperly or interacting with other medications.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently reviewing submissions from the pharmaceutical industry about the use of social media, and is expected to release new rules by the end of the year.

The role of social media in educating the public is something that should not be underestimated. Eric Ruth of the Delaware Online said,

On both sides,

Hot off the presses from Rich McCue, sysadmin at UVic Law: UVic Law Student Technology Survey 2010. There were new questions on this year’s survey concerning the mobile technology that UVic students arrive at law school with. Here’s the executive summary:

• 30% of students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet.
• 97% of students own laptops, and over 60% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 39% of student laptops are Macs.
• The average laptop price dropped to $1,200 from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• 82% of students bring their laptops to

When a legally facilitated monopoly over the distribution of a certain economic good is judged to be operating against the interests of one substantial segment of the party on whose behalf that monopoly is granted, what recourse is there? In the case of deferential Canada, that recourse would take the form of an imaginative, slightly unrealistic, proposal for a cooperative work-around. And in this particular case, it would work like this, at least on a back-of-the-envelope or blog scale.

The segment of the party on whose behalf this monopoly has been granted is the Canadian academic community, and the monopoly . . . [more]