A week later a field report from Project Rothstein.

Firstly, I’m delighted that the Slaw community really came together. Indeed Simon F and Simon C (who are old friends and colleagues) had the pleasure of consuming a bottle of Montepulciano with Connie Crosby Whom neither of us had ever met actually, yet we felt as if we’d collaborated for ever. Thanks to Connie and Simon for their introduction to writely.com, a Linux based collaborative word processing programme. It permitted us to work together on the same document, sometimes at the same time.

In addition, Mark Lewis compiled case law, . . . [more]

The publication of John McCamus’sSee his other professional biography. wonderfully thoughtful Law of Contracts a few weeks ago led to reflections about the market for Canadian legal publications.

There had always been hesitations about recommending specific texts on Canadian contract law (there being nothing with the clear stature of Anson on Contracts or Sir Gunter Treitel’s monograph); of course Waddams was scholarly (though one might end up wondering what the law was), Fridman was a bit formalistic (though with helpful footnotes, especially for smaller jurisdictions) and Jean Côté’s An Introduction to the Law of Contract (Juriliber, 1974) was stimulating . . . [more]

Representing Children Worldwide is a project of Yale Law School that attempts to catalogue “how children’s voices are heard in child protective proceedings” in an advertised 250 countries in the year 2005. This is an interesting, potentially useful, flawed project. Any data arrived at through a decent research method for such a spread of jurisdictions has real potential to help teachers, legislators and lawyers who find themselves working across legal boundaries.

The project seems to have run out of money, though, before it was completed. Thus, there’s nothing whatever on Canada, a jurisdiction that could have yielded up its various . . . [more]

I am surprised to appear to be the first SLAWyer to post the news that the Blackberry patent dispute appears to have been settled, as per this CBC news story. This is major news. I assume because the settlement was reached late Friday night that more discussion of the settlement will not occur until the open of business on Monday. . . . [more]

Further to Simon’s recent post on the possible establishment of a “public domain” registry/database: I think this is great news if it happens. I have been quite silent as a SLAW poster due to research I am conducting on early Canadian ragtime sheet music (circa 1899-1920) and have been trying to assess the possible public domain status of several pieces of sheet music. The US has a relatively simply rule (roughly, anything before 1923 is public domain, although the rule is not that simple). My limited understanding of the Canadian rule is that the Canadian rule depends on the . . . [more]

1. Times Online: The London Book Fair, Democracy in action, Shoot first
2. BBC News: Authors make book fair protest
3. Reed Elsevier, 2004 Corporate Social Responsibility [pdf]
4. House of Butter: Reed Elsevier And The Arms Traders
5. UNICEF: Land-mines: A deadly inheritance
6. idiolect.org.uk/notes
7. regular-expressions.info
8. TextPad
9. CBA PracticeLink: How to Build a Knowledge Management System: Manage Files Right, Right from the Start
10. CBA PracticeLink: New Media Marketing, Part I – Blogs: How Lawyers Can Become Thought Leaders in a Niche Market
11. CBA PracticeLink: New Media Marketing, Part II – How RSS Can Supercharge Your Legal Communications
12. Access Copyright news release: Canadian public domain registry

. . . [more]

Thursday’s Times Literary Supplement contains a Letter to the Editor from a distinguished group of authorsIncluding two Nobel Prize Winners, and a brace of Booker prizewinners, including Canadian Yann Martel suggesting a boycott of the London Book Fair, because its organizers (a sister company to Lexis) are linked to a company pivotal to world arms sales:

Times Online March 01, 2006
The London Book Fair

Sir, – The London Book Fair reflects the benign internationalism that can come from the business of writing. Later this week its stands and seminars will host visitors from eighty countries. The commerce of

. . . [more]

\b[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b Ever searched for one?We're used to searching the internet or databases for documents, making good use of Boolean search logic or its local variant, I hope.

Some items of interest in today’s CBA’s PracticeLink:

On KM:
How to Build a Knowledge Management System: Manage Files Right, Right from the Start By Edward Poll

On RSS and Blogs:
New Media Marketing, Part I – Blogs: How Lawyers Can Become Thought Leaders in a Niche Market By Janet Ellen Raasch

New Media Marketing, Part II – How RSS Can Supercharge Your Legal Communications By Janet Ellen Raasch

…and they offer two poscasts and RSS feeds as well. . . . [more]

Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency and
Creative Commons Canada, in partnership with Creative Commons Corporation in the US, today announced the development of a Canadian public domain registry. The ground-breaking project – the most comprehensive of its kind in Canada – will create an online, globally searchable catalogue of published works that are in the Canadian public domain.
Access Copyright news release

The first stage of the project will produce a registry of  Canadian works, the second a  registry of works from elsewhere. We are told (without any sense of irony) that the registry will  be freely . . . [more]

I wrote about my adventures with the Bell EV-DO Wireless card in an earlier post. Having used this card for a couple of months, I have to tell you I am in no rush to give this up. This card has been a lifesaver in the car and on the road – including on campus.

I have found the speeds at which you access the Internet using this card to be more than acceptable. I even use it around the office when not at my desk and separated from a LAN port.

For the mobile / road warrior the . . . [more]

Two weeks ago in this space I did a survey of major Canadian legal publishers, only to discover no one has yet started using RSS feeds to supply updated information about their products. A question was posed, as to whether the only reason to create an RSS feed is to avoid spam filters that mass email messages might encounter.

While this is a solid reason to use RSS, I envision something a wee bit beyond just reading each feed in a personal aggregator such as Bloglines or Feedreader. I envision setting myself (or perhaps my library association members) up with . . . [more]