Few lawyers in Canada – I except the wonderful Milt Zwicker – will remember the name of Kline D. Strong who died at the weekend. But he transformed the practice of law in North America.

Kline Duncan Strong 1927 ~ 2007 Kline was born January 23, 1927, in Driggs, Idaho He tried to impress upon his family that you’ve never really experienced work until you’ve hoed sugar beets. His professional education included a CPA/MBA from Northwestern University, a law degree from the University of Colorado and he was the first person to obtain a Ph.D in law office management. He . . . [more]

I’ll tie this to the privacy, law enforcement, and copyright disputes grab bag topic cluster to justify linking to these recent cool developments of the “geographic web”:

3D WorldViewer Everyscape Launches

Everyscape is a new service that takes 2D photos and 3D-fies them to create an immersive street-side experience

EveryScape Takes Streetview Indoors

On the face of it, their service is exactly the same as Google Streetview. EveryScape has driven around each of the cities creating full 360 degree panoramas. However, there’s one key twist — anyone can contribute. Contributions will help them go beyond other services and capture indoors

The marvelous English actor Stephen Fry (Oscar Wilde, Jeeves and Wooster, etc. etc. and the impending ITV series about a solicitor, Kingdom) has a new column for the Guardian Weekend all about his obsession with gadgets and things techie. The first column, “Welcome to dork talk“, sets the table for what is bound to be a run of highly entertaining — and knowledgeable — columns on thing that might well interest more than one reader of Slaw. Fry says:

…[W]hat kind of devices might I be discussing over the coming weeks? Including, but not confined to: mobile

Last week I was fortunate to attend the international conference Law Via the Internet held in Montreal, hosted by the good folks at LexUM who bring us our CanLII system.

Law Via the Internet coincides with the annual meeting of the Legal Information Institutes (or LIIs) from around the world.

Here are some of my take-away thoughts from the conference:

• free public access to law is key to helping developing countries eliminate poverty. Simply put, making the law accessible allows lawyers in a country do their job representing people, helping fight for people’s rights. Furthermore, organizations wanting to financially support

Today’s Glasgow Herald reports on a new service called CaseCheck, which is built on an open source blog platform. The service sprang from an innovative on-line dispute resolution service.

CaseCheck is a free online archive of decisions by the Scottish courts and industrial appeals tribunals launched on October 1. What makes it unique is the ability of readers to annotate the summary report of each decision, commenting on utility and coherence ((Family lawyers in Canada will remember that this was the service that the late J.G. MacLeod of UWO performed as he edited the RFLs)).

The next step is

Mind42 (“for two” — the notion being collaboration) is an online mindmapping tool that manages to capture pretty much the best of all the features of mindmapping. You can create any number of child or sibling nodes, move them around by simply dragging them, attach files and notes to them, use images for node text, and set up chat channels associated with nodes. When you’re done, you can share your map with a few or many. Or, as I’ve done below, embed it in your webpage via an iframe:

You can also export it to Freemind, Mindmanager and RTF (although . . . [more]

Almost two weeks ago the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), a volunteer-run wiki administered and housed in Edmonton, received a takedown notice from Aird & Berlis LLP acting for Universal Edition AG, the publisher of works by Bartok, Mahler, Schoenberg among others. The letter referred to the fact that some of the 15000 scores available on IMSLP were still under European copyright, though they were now in the public domain here in Canada. In Europe copyright persists for 70 years after the death of the composer; in Canada the post-mortem period is 50 years.

Care had been taken to . . . [more]

David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined (2002) ((Weinberger, D. (2002). Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.)) and one of the four contributors to the Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger, 2000) ((Levine, R., Locke, C., Searls, D., & Weinberger, D. (2000). The Cluetrain Manifesto : The End of Business As Usual. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books.)), published a new book this year: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007). ((New York: Times Books.)) The central argument for the book is that a new order in organizing . . . [more]

A recent article  on a San Francisco-based web site has this this caption

American kids, dumber than dirt
Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

 The article states:

No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens

You may notice that now, beneath each entry, there’s a link that invites you to “Print this post.” Clicking it will take you to a page containing a stripped down version of the relevant entry and a list of links referred to in that entry; if it’s what you want, the print button at the bottom of the page will send it on its way to your printer. I’d been meaning to install this for some time and was finally kicked into action by a kind email from a reader who pointed out how unsatisfactory the results of the browser . . . [more]

In trying to get into the Halloween spirit, I have conducted a small search for ghouly related material in various Canadian legal fields. However; the only mention of Halloween in Canadian Legislation is in the Proclamation Declaring October 31st of each year to be “National UNICEF Day”. Vampires do get mentioned in the Wild Animal and Plant Trade Regulations but there is no mention of werewolves, zombies, mummies,or dracula. Mummy’s do get mentioned quite often in caselaw but that is a different type of mummy than what is associated with Halloween. Some of the other ghoulies mentioned previously come . . . [more]

I have to be brief this week, because I’m posting this from the LexUM conference in Montreal, while listening with one ear to the translated words of a speaker on the issue of information overload.

I’ve noticed lately that I have trouble hearing the occasional word. I think it must be because the people I hang out with are getting older and so have an increasing tendency to mumble. This can be frustrating, but it can also be fun when I find my brain supplying an amusing word or phrase to replace the blur. The classic instance of this is . . . [more]