I moved last weekend! My husband and I have spent the last couple of years (and the next 20?) developing a farm. In the technology portion of our development plan, we decided not to put hard wired telephone lines on our property to avoid the large Individual Line Surcharges that the CRTC allows and we paid the last time we developed a property.

Moving to the VoIP world has been interesting. Our digital cordless handsets don’t work and we have had to revert to a single analog handset until I can find a cordless analog phone. I have yet to . . . [more]

As its contribution to the federal election debate, the Canadian section of the international human rights organization Amnesty International today released a new report entitled Strengthening our Commitment: A Human Rights Agenda for Canada.

The group says it wants to draw the attention of candidates to crucial national and international human rights challenges that it claims Canada has not been doing enough to meet. The report outlines 10 areas in which it says Canada has been falling behind:

• Human rights and national security laws
• Human rights in Canadian foreign policy
• Canada on the world stage
• The rights of Indigenous

A note from Maritime Law Book points out that cases from the Ontario Divisional Court from 1984 to the present are available free on MLB’s Ontario Appeal Cases database and that CanLII offers Div. Ct. (Ont.) cases from 2002 to the present only. . . . [more]

Francis Gurry, formerly a Senior Lecturer in Law in the University of Melbourne, was appointed Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in the spring and will take office on October 1. Yesterday he gave an acceptance speech to the the General Assembly of WIPO in which he outlined some of the challenges facing the UN organization and its member states. From the press release:

“The functional consequence of this trend [to harness the economic value of innovation through the acquisition of property rights] is that the system is becoming a victim of its own success” with patent

Slashdot reports that today has been declared World Day Against Software Patents by the European based Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure

They believe that software patents impede innovation and investment.

So depending on what side of this debate one falls on, feel free to either celebrate and promote it, or cringe and rail against it.

My thoughts? First, my bias – I’m not a patent agent, although I do deal with a lot of IP and IT issues, and advise companies that create and sell software or SAAS products. I have mixed feelings about it – but can’t help . . . [more]

The Canadian Insolvency Foundation invites applications for the fourth annual Lloyd Houlden Research Fellowship. The $20,000 Houlden Fellowship will be awarded for a paper that addresses current issues in Canadian insolvency policy and practice. Papers should be 7,000 to 10,000 words in length and should be written for an audience consisting of those involved in insolvency practice, insolvency law or in the development and analysis of insolvency policy.

The author should propose an original analysis of innovative ways to improve the insolvency system, a historical analysis of particular features of the system or an exploration of any other insolvency-related idea. . . . [more]

I got a look at InfoVell today, and it is an interesting service. It provides single-point access to a selection of free US sources of health science, patent and other specialist information, AKA part of the ‘deep web’. Slawyers might use it for researching Health Law. The fact that a person can search there once for information that might take a number of searches otherwise is what is known in library circles as ‘federated searching.’ It embeds detailed knowledge of sources and search methods (what librarians know) into an easy to use format. Of course, it also hides from the . . . [more]

It seems we have not posted Jureeka to Slaw yet. It is a service that provides linkages between legal information searchers and providers. As part of the effort, it offers a Firefox extension that detects legal citations on the web and displays them as links. The extension is now is functional for citations to Canadian resources, including

• The Constitution Acts (1867 and 1982)
• Supreme Court cases from 1876 to the present (S.C.R. and SCC citations)
• Federal Court cases from 1988 to the present (F.C. citations)
• Consolidated Statutes of Canada
• Consolidated Regulations of Canada

The fact that such extensions mess . . . [more]

Like an alcoholic seeking a drink, I thought that I would buy software to automate and save time in making backups of whatever I’m working on and have saved. I made a careful search for well-recommended software and discovered that Novastor Backup 10, Professional, for a single user, was highly recommended.

What a mistake! My attempt at downloading what I had bought failed. I eventually got a very nice young man from Novastor’s tech support to assist me with the installation. He had to download a number of upgrades, patches or whatever, from Microsoft, making it clear to me (and . . . [more]

The European Community is preparing to launch a digital “library, museum and archive,” Europeana, that will give visitors some access to two million European objects of cultural interest and value. Two years in the making, this front end for a host of digital objects will launch in November of this year. But you can see a canned demo now that will give you a pretty good idea of what’s in store.

There’s also a short video accessible from the main page that’s less useful but which features Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” one of the all-time . . . [more]

Here’s a search engine that promises to reduce our chasing and improve the catching, by offering access to the shadowy ‘deep web.’ InfoVell requires a free registration, and they are coyly waiting a day or so to send me my password, but then they say anticipation is 90% of excess, or something like that. . . . [more]

Huge volumes of business data are nothing new. But the ways data can hurt you these days – well, that’s a different story. In an age when your company can rise or fall on how they manage their information how an organization manages its ever-growing mountains of data can be the difference between a good day at the office and sheer disaster.

Some organisations take a “wait and see” approach to controlling information. They keep their fingers crossed for nothing to go wrong – and then call in help when it does. That’s a short-sighted view that creates more risk . . . [more]