One common misunderstanding about copyright is that online content is not protected by copyright. Not true! Even if the content is posted without a copyright notice or other copyright information, that content should be presumed to be protected by copyright.

The same copyright principles apply to photographs posted on Flickr. In a recent situation, Toyota U.S.A. posted some photos on one of its Web sites — photos it obtained from the photography site, Flickr — without permission of the photographers. Toyota has now made a public apology and has removed the photographs. Lesson for all: get permission when using content . . . [more]

Not sure if YouTube is your thing? Alabama trial attorney Lew Garrison has created a YouTube-like site for law-related video, called LegalTube. According to Law.com, the site was launched on September 1st after four months of development. It is billed as a video directory for finding lawyers, but in addition to advertising video, there is legal humour, courtroom stories, and a “webisode reality series” called Law After Dark. The site also has a news alert video series on drug recalls and class action lawsuits.

And in case you were wondering, LegalTube has its own channel on . . . [more]

Still doubtful about video as a marketing vehicle? A few recent milestones from YouTube, the leading site for video distribution, be it entertainment-related or professional:

• as of October, YouTube is now up to over a billion views each day
• as of May, at least 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute
• Increased high definition (HD) resolution is coming to YouTube starting this week. 1080p HD will be the new maximum resolution, up from the previous 720p HD. This is in response to the increasing resolution of consumer cameras. See the blog post for comparative examples.

Although tweeting from a courtroom remains controversial, tweeting the content of a live webcast should be rather conventional, but is still a useful enterprise.

I was in the middle of a take-home midterm when I realized that the Omar Khadr hearing at the Supreme Court of Canada was on CPAC. After a few searches on Twitter, I realized that although people had posted that it was occurring, nobody in the legal community was covering the contents live (or almost live – a Senate broadcast delayed it).

I gave it a go, although the proceedings were well under . . . [more]

CNet reports that a couple of US universities have decided against using the Kindle as a replacement for textbooks, on accessibility grounds:

“The big disappointment was learning that the Kindle DX is not accessible to the blind,” Ken Frazier, the University of Wisconsin-Madison director of libraries, said in a statement.

Said the National Federation of the Blind:

[The] “menus of the device are not accessible to the blind…making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle

One of my continuing Slaw quests is to prove the axiom that everything has a legal connection. While this bit of proof is not exactly a new item it is timely, in some parts of the country at least. In a move that strikes me as something that is somehow quintessentially Canadian, Quebec has mandated by law that all passenger vehicles must be equipped with winter tires. The Highway Safety Code, R.S.Q. c. C-24.2, s. 440.1 states:

Between 15 December and 15 March, the owner of a taxi or a passenger vehicle registered in Québec may not put the

Omar Khadr’s lawyer is currently arguing before the Supreme Court of Canada (you can watch/listen to it live). He just now (10.10 a.m.) announce to the Court that he learned an hour ago that the U.S. Military Commission prosecution of Khadr, which had been stalled, is to continue. . . . [more]

What is it that Slaw does not do, lawyers do only discreetly, and everyone else does pretty much all the time?

Advertise, of course. And what’s one of the big names in that trade?

ساعاتجي.

Saatchi, that is. Well, Saatchi and Saatchi, actually: brothers Maurice (the Baron) and Charles (Mr. Nigella Lawson). This isn’t about their careers in advertising, however — though that’s an interesting tale all in itself. No, it’s a fillip about a small portion of the home page of Charles’ Saatchi Online site, which is an offshoot, so to speak, of his Saatchi Gallery of contemporary art. . . . [more]

The Library Journal reported:

A Harvard University Task Force on University Libraries has released a report [PDF] aimed at building a 21st-century library, knitting together the university’s robust and disparate library units, collaborating with peer libraries, and emphasizing access to materials rather than acquisition.

It is budget planning season at my firm. I like to offer our firm management creative solutions for keeping costs low while offering exceptional services and maintaining a collection so lawyers a Field Law have resources at hand to find the best solutions four our client. In the decade that I have shared . . . [more]

Today’s Halifax Chronicle Herald reports that the current mayor of Cape Breton municipality, John Morgan, is about to face a disciplinary hearing by the Nova Scotia Barristers Society for professional misconduct. He’s not accused of bad lawyering (he hasn’t been practicing since becoming mayor in 2000), but of being discourteous to the bench in media interviews in connection with a particularly contentious lawsuit brought by the municipality against the province for a greater share of equilization funds. From the Herald article:

“Specifically, the charges allege that the member failed in his duty to encourage public respect for justice and to

A couple of new features are now available at Quickscribe’s BC Legislation Portal:

1. BC Bills Tracker – As BC Bills recieve their 1st or 3rd Reading and added into the Quickscribe databases, the new bill tracker page will automatically publish those alerts.
2. BC Consequential Amendments – When proposed legislation, if passed, will amend another Act, this page category will aggregate those related alerts.

Both tools may be personalized further – limiting by area of law, for example – using Quickscribe’s (free) RSS alert service for Bill Tracking. But if users are simply after a roundup of new BC . . . [more]

In C.H. Giles & Co. Ltd. v. Morris, [1972] 1 W.L.R. 307, [1972] 1 All E.R. 960 at 971 (Ch.D., Megarry J.) said:

… In this judgment I have referred to a number of authorities not cited in argument. On the procedural point I have reached no final conclusion, and so the citation of additional authorities in that respect does not raise any particular difficulty. But it is otherwise in relation to the question of specific enforceability. On this, the only authority cited to me by either side was Fry, cited by counsel for the defendants. Wilson v West