Sandra Gelsing’s blawg, Now, Why Didn’t I Think of That, has a piece on the tussle between the Canadian Olympic Committee and CAN FUND, a charity raising funds for Olympic athletes. Apparently, the COC claimed a trade mark right to the expressions “See you in Vancouver,” “See you in Torino,” and “See you in Beijing,” all of which CAN FUND felt it owned. The COC played the “public authority” card from s. 9 (“prohibited marks”) of the Trade-marks Act which says,

9. (1) No person shall adopt in connection with a business, as a trade-mark or otherwise, any mark

Since Earth Day falls on a Sunday this year, some Slawyers might not have noticed the Google “holiday” logo:

Kind of courageous to show your company logo in the process of deterioration. . . . [more]

I am proud to be hosting the Blawg Review on my personal blog this coming Monday, April 23rd. Blawg Review has more information, including instructions on how to get your blawg posts reviewed in this upcoming issue.

I have had a few submissions already. Please keep them coming!!! Deadline is tonight at 11:59 Pacific Time. You do need to submit as per the submissions guidelines.

I was selected to host by Ed. in honour of World Book and Copyright Day. So, anything related to this subject particularly welcome.

Cheers,
Connie . . . [more]

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I attended Computers in Libraries for the first time this week. It was a much larger conference than I expected (2600+), and had a lot more celebrity librarians (yes, there are several) than I expected. I was privileged to meet a number of people whose blogs, papers and tweets I have been following for a while.

The lessons are still sinking in. I came away feeling we have done a good job keeping ahead of the curve here at Slaw in our understanding of new social networking media. The focus at this conference was very much Web 2.0/Library 2.0 (for . . . [more]

Behold, a woman of letters:

Thanks to ASCII-O-Matic, you can take a photo (dimensions 60 pixels wide and 50 pixels high; jpeg format) and have it converted into an image formed of ASCII characters. The thing will even kick out an HTML file that, when you use “view source,” shows you every cell in the table and all of the formatting — if that’s your sort of thing.

In case you think that Slawyer Connie Crosby would look better pixelated done in squares, I’ve caused ASCII-O-Matic to create a version in that form too. The thumbnail here is linked . . . [more]

John Swan and I are pleased to announce the winners of the Collective Noun Contest. We decided we should have both French and English winners. We won’t ask you to imagine the Herculean task it was to select amongst the candidates.

Simon Chester earns the French language prize based on quality of submissions, too. Singling out one of his was difficult. His French offerings include “un jaillissement des juristes“, which I ranked first not the least because of the almost-English punning misdirection: “jaillissement” contains “jail” but has nothing to do with punishing judges for their errors, . . . [more]

The Clean Internet Act (Bill C-427) is a private member’s bill which makes one wonder about many things. Since this is not a forum for political discussion, as such, I won’t mention the primarily political, ethical, philisophical, educational, intellectual, educational, and other rational things it makes me wonder about. Since this is a legal forum, I will mention that it makes me a wonder about the nature and extent of the training in law or legal issues possessed by anyone involved in the drafting and presentation of this work.

Read about the presenter’s rationale at the second of the links  . . . [more]

Hello slawyers – here are some pictures of the Leg@l IT Conference in Montreal last Monday… Enjoy. . . . [more]

This from the BC Courthouse Library Society webpage.

The Inner Temple Library has recently launched a selective Current Awareness blog, intended to provide up-to-date information regarding new case law, changes in legislation, and legal news. The content is selected and updated daily by information professionals on the staff of the Inner Temple Library.

Fortunately, I could find nothing on the DaVinci Code . . . [more]

A while back I bemoaned the fact that you can’t link directly to the paragraph of your choice within another’s web page (“Purple Numbers, Plinks, Cruft and the SCC“). Well, it seems that now you can, thanks to Citebite. You select the passage you want to point to, insert it into the “quote” box on the Citebite page, tell Citebite the URL, and wait while it concocts a URL that, when used, takes you to the very page you wanted with the very paragraph (or portion) you wanted highlighted in yellow.

The only procedural downside I can . . . [more]

I came across a fascinating article in Monday’s Toronto Star. “Archivists embrace digital page” highlights the University of Toronto’s digitization contributions to the Internet Archive. Located on the seventh floor of Robarts Library, this local scanning operation digitizes mostly old rare books into five different formats. The scanning centre’s production numbers are impressive: