Jason Eiseman, Computer Automation Librarian at Schwabe Williamson & Wyatt, an Oregon law firm, has produced a three part tutorial for law librarians on using RSS. The tuts run as Flash movies with sound. The introduction runs 6 minutes, using an aggregator 13 minutes and advanced RSS 16 minutes. Since RSS is still very much a minority taste among legal workers, these tuts might prove quite useful. . . . [more]

Those of you who have cases that seem to have dragged on forever may find the Internet Medieval Source Book‘s pages on medieval law useful and interesting. A project of Fordham University, the main medieval law links page will give you a tour d’horizon of Roman, Canon, Germanic, English, Jewish, Islamic law texts. This is a fairly comprehensive collection of resources. . . . [more]

Just when you thought that the whole craziness of IP couldn’t get any more strange… along comes VueStar Technologies, a Singaporean company that claims a patent on using images to link to a webpage. It seems the company does have Singapore Patent No. 95940 and on that basis is sending bills to firms in Singapore for an annual license of their patent. According to the story in ZDNet Asia, the VueStar has also received a patent in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. A very quick search for VueStar in the Canadian patent database didn’t get a hit. . . . [more]

A 2007 discussion paper mooting a proposed “plurilateral” Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, to bind Canada, the U.S., Japan, and European nations among others, has been making the rounds of various websites lately. Leaked last week by the interesting WikiLeaks, you can read the document here [PDF].

Quite apart from anything else, the role proposed to be given to border guards seems problematic.

[And while I’m here, why “plurilateral,” a word that hasn’t yet made it to the online OED? What was wrong with “multilateral”?] . . . [more]

Any of our readers who are not also regular readers of www.thecourt.ca, Osgoode Hall Law School’s blog about the Supreme Court of Canada, should take a moment to visit this morning.

The editors of The Court have posted an interview with Louise Meagher, the Supreme Court’s Deputy Registrar, on the Courtroom Modernization Program at the SCC. . . . [more]

The contest over net neutrality in Canada is heating up. A new website, SaveOurNet.ca, has been launched by a coalition of individuals and groups, to publicize the issue and to solicit support for neutrality. Tomorrow, Tuesday, there’s to be a rally across the noon hour on Parliament Hill, and the organizers are even offering to transport people to Ottawa from Montreal, Toronto and Chatham. If you’re interested you’ll find details at http://netneutralityrally.ca/. . . . [more]

A few Slawyers are currently in Saskatoon at the annual conference of CALL/ACBD. On Sunday we held business meetings of the various committees and special interest groups, as well as held a Vendor Liaison Committee Open Forum to discuss publisher/vendor issues, followed by demonstrations by a number of the vendors.

A few trends to report back:

• During the Vendor Liaison Committee Open Forum the publishers asked about reducing the number of paper catalogues they produce both to be more environmentally friendly and no doubt to also reduce costs as catalogues are expensive to produce and print. One suggestion was

HeinOnline has recently added a layer of text behind the image PDFs in the English Reports library, which means that subscribers can now search through downloaded documents in their PDF readers. Hein aims to make all its PDFs searchable by the end of the year. The next libraries that will be released in searchable form are: European Center for Minority Issues, Foreign & International Law Resources Database, Philip C. Jessup Library, Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP), and the U.S. Attorney General Opinions Library.

There’s a video demonstrating the use of this new facility. . . . [more]

Readers may be interested in the decision of the Quebec Court of Appeal in the BCE bondholders case, released late Wednesday. The PDF of the judgment [2.5 MB] is available here on Slaw. It is not yet on CanLII. . . . [more]

The 9-0 SCC judgment is 2008 SCC 28.

By making the product of its interviews of Mr Khadr available to US authorities, Canada participated in a process that was contrary to Canada’s international human rights obligations.

Khadr is entitled to see some of the documents he has requested. . . . [more]

I’ve got the brain on, well, the brain today. It’s partly, I suppose, because of the news of Senator Kennedy’s illness. Partly, too, because of a set of book reviews I’m reading in Harper’s, “A Mind of Its Own, Resisting the tyranny of the brain” by Gary Greenberg. And of course I, like you, spend a good deal of time each day with my electronic brain, a.k.a. my computer. So the brain it is, today.

First, wonder. We hear all too often how AI is going to duplicate our thinking abilities, how as the internet grows ever larger . . . [more]

Today is Convocation here at Dalhousie Law so I first want to use this platform to congratulate all of the Dal Law graduates on a job well done, and wish them the best as they embark on their legal careers; and come to think of it, meet a lot of you who read this blog, so be nice!

Also, as has been mentioned previously, here at Slaw, today is the eve of the 2008 CALL/ACBD conference in Saskatoon. In addition to the Programhave a glimpse at the Committee and Special Interest Group pages in order to see some . . . [more]