Yesterday, I abandoned my office for several hours to attend “The First Annual World’s Fair Use Day” at the Newseum in Washington D.C. It was organized by the D.C.-based non-profit consumer advocacy group, Public Knowledge. There is lots of information and coverage on this event at http://worldsfairuseday.org/. I will limit my comments to some personal musings (in chronological order as the day unfolded.) . . . [more]

In response to my query in my earlier post on Fee Fie Foe Firm from a short while back in which I wondered how there could be 1,500 Canadian law firms targeted or searched by their custom search, I have had an update. Damien McRae, a knowledge consultant from Australia and founder of Fee Fie Foe Firm, has confirmed to me in an email that his site does in fact search/target 1500 selected Canadian law firms (as opposed to using some sort of automatic scraping of URLs).

Although I had meant to add some better refinements to my Custom . . . [more]

The blogosphere and twitterverse are buzzing today about the stand Google took yesterday in China. Google basically said it would no longer censor results for Chinese users as required by the Chinese government, and if the government didn’t like it, they would leave.

Seems that the last straw was a series of cyber attacks on Google and others trying to steal proprietary information, and trying to read the gmail accounts of human rights activists. Google claims the Chinese government is behind those attacks.

This is a bold move by Google. We often see how businesses, governments and courts struggle with . . . [more]

I thought I knew everything about legal research.

I don’t (although I suspect Simon, Simon and Angela do).

And to my surprise, it was Wikipedia that was my source for new information (in particular Wikipedia’s entry on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council).

We all know that civil appeals from the Supreme Court of Canada to the Judicial committee of the Privy Council were abolished in 1949.

In telling students this, I think I inevitably left the (mistaken) impression, by inference, that one did not need to worry about noting up Supreme Court of Canada cases after 1949 . . . [more]

Rule #408 Don’t lay claim to your personal coffee mug by mass e-mail.

Rule #78 It is impossible to send an e-mail longer than two paragraphs without a typo.

Rule #765 A managing partner should never walk the halls in stocking feet.

Rule #189 Docketing “twittering” to client development is sure to invite ridicule.

Rule #685 Don’t hang a picture of yourself wearing a bathing suit in your office.

Rule #441 If you’re under 50 and using a fountain pen you’re trying too hard.

Rule #210 Make funny faces and adoring comments when a new baby visits no matter what . . . [more]

A note that Stanford is hosting the first of Law.Gov’s workshops laying the groundwork for

a report documenting exactly what it would take to create a distributed registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.

Here is the announcement, the home page, the live blog, and the mailing list, The Twittter hashtag is #law.gov.

Authenticity is a highlighted technical concern, which is good to see. I presented on this problem recently at the Grey Literature 11 conference in Washington DC. Here is the abstract. . . . [more]

From the Yale Law Library’s latest exhibition, wonderful images of Justice, as portrayed in a forthcoming book by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: From Renaisance Town Halls to 21st Century Democratic Courtrooms.

Here is a taste of images from “Praxis Rerum Civilium,” by Joost de Damhoudere, “De Jure Belli ac Pacis,” by Hugo Grotius, and “Dei Delitti e delle pene,” by Cesare Beccaria: . . . [more]

Canadian trade-mark applicants and their agents must continue to be mindful of a trend at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) to compress timelines for trade-mark prosecution and proceedings.

After months of consultation period, CIPO has released a new Practice Notice on January 11, 2010 on extensions of time in trade-mark examination. Effective March 11, 2010, the Trade-marks Office will generally grant an applicant one (1) extension of time of up to a maximum of six (6) months to file a response to an examiner’s report, if the request is justified. No requests for any further extensions of time will . . . [more]

Today’s Calgary Herald reports the death of the distinguished Canadian legal author, John Ballem QC of Gowlings, at the age of 85.

Those of us who have had to refer to Ballem’s masterpiece, The oil and gas lease in Canada (now in its third edition) and his pioneering work on fiduciary duties in the 1963 Alberta Law Review, will likely not realize that he was also the author of fourteen novels (The Devil’s Lighter, The Dirty Scenario, The Judas Conspiracy (reissued as Alberta Alone), The Moon Pool, Sacrifice Play, The Marigot Run, Oilpatch Empire, Death Spiral, The Barons, Manchineel, . . . [more]

Among the most important pieces of legislation that came into force last January First is the Act respecting the Compilation of Québec Laws and Regulations, S.Q. 2009, c. 40 (version française : L.Q. 2009, c. 40).

Pursuant to this Act, all consolidated statutes published by the Québec Official Publisher have official status “whatever the medium used“, including of course those published online by the Publications du Québec. Consolidations of regulatory texts will have official status on January first 2012. In the mean time, certain regulations will have official status if so stated within the published document. . . . [more]

There is lots of advice around, addressed to the young and innocent but probably applicable to the old and jaded as well, to be cautious about what one puts online about oneself, since it could be there for a long time and influence people whose interest you have not yet thought about — future employers and mates being two of the main classes.

The French are now pondering a legal ‘right to forget’ (un droit à l’oubli) — or at least a right of a person to get old information about him/herself taken down. The BBC has the . . . [more]

All Toronto public library branches now have free Wi-Fi Internet access. Anyone with a laptop or smartphone can now access the Internet for however long they want in any library branch.

See Toronto Public Library announcement. . . . [more]