Michael Geist, professor of law at University of Ottawa, and editor of the BNA’s daily Internet Law News, has today pioneered a new approach to legal publishing in Canada. He has edited a major collection of essays on the future of copyright reform in Canada. And he convinced Jeff Miller at Irwin Law to release the book, In the Public Interest, under a Creative Commons license, which means that Chapters can be downloaded for personal use, free of charge. And Michael has given the royalties to Creative Commons.

Check out this Irwin Law page for a glimpse at how . . . [more]

Marc Galanter has just published [an apparently serious] survey of the meaning of lawyer jokes, thus proving that some academics have too much time on their hands.

See this week’s TLS . . . . [more]

I’ve put a link on the right menu to a section called “By The Week.” It goes to a page where you can find “This Week’s Links” since I’ve been doing that and as well an image of the website’s front page as of Friday of any given week. This may be mere self-reflection for Slaw, but I think it will be interesting some time from now to be able to look back and actually see the posts we made in a particular week and to have access to the various links referred to in the posts and comments. . . . [more]

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There's a new player on the Web, Rollyo, aiming to become useful to the many -- and it just may succeed.

The MIT Media Laboratory expects to launch a prototype of its US$100 laptop in November, according to Nicholas Negroponte, the lab’s chairman and co-founder. The facility has been working with industry partners to develop a notebook computer for use by children in primary and secondary education around the world, particularly in developing countries. The laptops should start appearing in volume in late 2006.

A new website has been released for the new Governor General of Canada, Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaelle Jean. The statement on her home page:

I am eagerly looking forward to meeting my fellow-Canadians very soon. I am convinced that Canada will continue to accomplish great things if we work together for a better quality of life–for our own population and for humanity. Our country is vast and it is blessed with a wealth of colours and the varied music of its tongues and accents. Many have not had the good fortune of measuring its full extent. I

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Available from the e-Laws website, the website for Ontario legislation, there is a Bilingual Lexicon of Legislative Terms (253 page, PDF). Also available in HTML format. Updated to December 31, 2004. There does not appear to be an index or finding tool for either PDF or HTML version, so the software’s “find” functions do need to be used to locate terms quickly. Still, this is an impressive collection. . . . [more]

[via Joy London’s Excited Utterances and Tom Baldwin’s Knowledgeline]

A group of KM professionals recently gathered by conference call to discuss the need and interest of forming a national/international group focused specifically on legal KM.

We agreed that it was logical to form such a group but wanted to solicit feedback and gauge interest from a larger segment of KM professionals before taking the next steps at organization.

Please take a few moments to complete this survey and provide your opinion.

I did my part, and I know there are other Canadian KM-types in ‘the crowd‘ here . . . [more]

For anyone not paying attention, on the Google home page today there is a little celebratory graphic indicating that Google is actually seven years old.

My, how time flies!! . . . [more]

Google has released a stable (non-beta) version of its toolbar for Firefox. I won’t go through all of the features — some of you may already be using the toolbar for IE, though if you’re not using Firefox you should consider it seriously: tabbed browsing and popup blocking would alone make Firefox superior, but there’s lots more. Of the toolbar features, highlighting searched-for terms, word-find (finding your searched-for terms in a page), and Google suggest are those that make it interesting. . . . [more]

The Fogler Rubinoff library recently faced the daunting task of disposing of 200 boxes of books which had formerly occupied shelves in our library but were now, with a prior library downsizing, a recent move, and the availability of all of the material online, in a storage facility in the basement of the TD Centre. After many phone calls and listserv postings, we discovered that print report series have no value and that it is difficult and time consuming to find a home for them. Neither University of Toronto nor York University had any interest in the series. We had . . . [more]