In a bit of a twist on recent practice, it seems that the state of Oregon is aggressively asserting copyright over statutes and legislation. In late April the legal resource website Justia, was served with a cease and desist order ((As Blog-ed at Justia.com)) by the Legislative Counsel of the State of Oregon pursuant to Justia posting Oregon laws. Interestingly, the state is not claiming copyright on the text itself but on such things as the “arrangement and subject matter compliation… the leadlines and numbering for each statutory section, the tables, index and annotations…” ((From the order posted . . . [more]

The Association of College & Research Libraries publication C&RL News has a current article by Anne Blecksmith pointing to open access digital image collections on the deep Web (you won’t find these collections via search engines or Flickr). The article links to and describes a wide array of digital image collections, including collaborative collections as well as those from universities, public libraries and archives, and historical societies. See the post on this article from one of my favorite blogs ReadWriteWeb. . . . [more]

According to a recent article in The Economist, the advent of e-discovery may be the single most significant change to the legal system in the last half century. This is principally due to the huge volumes of material that can be involved and the sometimes staggering cost of processing it. It has been aptly put by Ken Withers, Director of Judicial Education and Content for The Sedona Conference,

More money is probably spent litigating electronic discovery problems than in litigating class actions…this is part of potentially every case in the 21st century

Approximately 60 billion emails are created and . . . [more]

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has launched a new website called A Nation’s Chronicle: The Canada Gazette:

“Often referred to as ‘the official newspaper of the Government of Canada,’ the Canada Gazette has been an important instrument in the Canadian democratic process for more than 160 years. It has served to inform Canadians of the operations of government and to involve them actively in the legislative process. With this site, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), in co-operation with the Canada Gazette Directorate, Public Works and Government of Services Canada, will make the Gazette available online, in its entirety, for

Simon has written a few times here about Powerset, a developing search engine that attempts to analyze web pages by looking at their meaning rather than just as a set of keywords.

Well, the site has finally gone live this week. So far, it indexes only a small set of pages – those found in Wikipedia and Freebase. They have plans to index more data sets in the near future.

The site is getting quite a bit of publicity for a search engine – see articles from ABC News and the NY Times.

The consensus seems to be . . . [more]

With Simon F being in Spain and all, it seems we fell down a bit on one of our regular editorial items – the Friday Fillip.

While I won’t even try to fill Simon’s shoes, I would like to offer up my latest web-experiment as a Monday pseudo-fillip: legalvoices.com… A site showing the most recent twitter entries from individuals connected to the legal industry; around 150-ish at last count. If you’ve heard of twitter, and want to see what the service looks like without the investment, I’d encourage you to check it out.

Also related & potentially helpful . . . [more]

CALL/ACBD’s annual conference is quickly approaching. This year we are meeting in beautiful Saskatoon. There is still time to register if you have not yet done so! Also, the pre-conference workshop on Saturday, May 24th is the Law Library Leadership Institute looks outstanding.

If you go, please say hello. . . . [more]

Some interesting developments on legal scholarship at Harvard: . . . [more]

Roy Mersky may not have been the first person to ride a horse through a major law library but he was likely the smartest, shortest and most published ((His bibliography is awesome in its length)). . . . [more]

This is for all the “CrackBerrys” out there: Today’s Globe and Mail has a list of the top ten downloadable applications for your BlackBerrys. The most popular ones include Google Maps, Facebook, Google Search and Sudoku Classic. . . . [more]

Yesterday the Webbies were announced. They’re described by the New York Times as ‘the Oscars of the internet’, and are judged by a panel which includes Simpsons creator Matt Groening and movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Once you get beyond the gushing over the creative use of new technologies by Stephen Colbert for the Colbert Report and Will.i.am on the Obama campaign, the list includes a couple of quite excellent law-related websites.

Out-law by Pinsent/Masons we’ve blogged about over the last couple of years, won the overall Best Website Award. Even more remarkable, it was the first non-US site to . . . [more]

Well this is news to me! If you check out Michel-Adrien’s post below, this news item was delivered via a new CanLII blog. And guess what? There’s an RSS feed too!

Now we can follow along at home. :) . . . [more]