On 30 October 2014 the UK Court of Appeal released a decision that is likely to send a frisson of fear down the spine of governments everywhere.

The Court allowed the appellants Abdul Hakim Belhaj and his wife Fatima Boudchar to sue the British Secret Intelligence Service and the Minister responsible for it at the material time, for a declaration of illegality and for damages.

The claim alleges that the respondents participated in the unlawful abduction, detention and rendition of Mr Belhaj and Ms Boudchar to Libya, where they were imprisoned and tortured.

No determination has yet been made on . . . [more]

So your firm has one or more social media accounts they use to deliver its message. But do you have a social media policy for your employees to use? In this day and age, many of your employees have personal (Facebook) and professional (LinkedIn) accounts that may be effectively associated with the firm, based on the employee’s sharing of information. It’s best to have a general guideline to help the lawyers and staff at your firm know the risks and to guide them through how their online activity may affect their professional lives.

A few points to consider when creating . . . [more]

Last week I looked at Harry Surden’s paper on the application of “machine learning” techniques to the practice of law and the recent talk he gave at a Codex Speaker Series in Stanford. After introducing the concept of “machine learning,” Surden notes that although artificial intelligence is still unable to stand in for complex human thought processes we can still get “intelligent results without intelligence.” He also points out that, the goal here is not to replace attorneys with machines. Instead these algorithms “act as a compliment” which can help to make litigation processes and attorneys themselves more efficient. . . . [more]

The first technology column I wrote for Slaw was called Robot Law. In those days, the main uses of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) – aka drones – were military, either for reconnaissance or for attack. Since then, civilian uses have expanded, and the technology has evolved to serve them. Individuals can readily buy drones the size of insects or the size of a microwave oven or larger. Commercial versions can be the size of small aircraft.

Among the many peaceful uses of drones are surveying, especially of hard-to-access or remote lands and installations like . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. SOQUIJ  2. FamilyLLB 3. Canadian Privacy Law Blog  4. Double Aspect  5. FP Legal Post

SOQUIJ
La protection de l’image d’une personne est associée au respect du droit à sa vie privée

Il y aura violation au droit à l’image, en tant que composante du droit au respect de . . . [more]

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been described as a symbol of Canadian identity. It is a fundamental part of our constitution, yet the notion of protecting our rights and freedoms is something which is often misunderstood.

In 1983, soon after the Charter‘s inception, Peter Russell described the notion of protection as something which was often explained as either present or not. Instead, as he stated in his article, “The Political Purposes of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,”

…in our actual civic experience we do not encounter these rights and freedoms in such a zero-sum

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Criminal Law

Voltage Pictures LLC v. John Doe et al. 2014 FC 161
Copyright – Equity – Practice – Telecommunications
Summary: Voltage Pictures LLC, a film production company, hired a forensic investigation company to investigate whether any of Voltage’s cinematographic works were being copied and distributed in Canada over P2P (peer to peer) file . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

RESPONSABILITÉ : L’utilité ou la valeur informationnelle des services offerts sur le site Internet Google Maps n’est pas à ce point déterminante ou dominante qu’elle justifie un empiétement sur les droits à l’image et à la vie privée de la demanderesse.

Intitulé : Pia Grillo c. Google inc., 2014 QCCQ . . . [more]

The International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) have adopted a new international standard for the protection of personally identifiable information by public cloud computer service providers.

It is intended to set out best practices for companies operating in this area, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine.

Here is a description of the standard by a privacy advice site.

Is this likely to be helpful to your clients, either those having their information stored and treated in the cloud or those who offer cloud services? Will it influence your contracts?

In particular, will it . . . [more]

The dead puck era in the National Hockey began roughly in 1995 and lasted through the lockout of 2004. The dead puck era was marked by stifling defense and low scoring games as teams employed a defensive strategy known as the “neutral zone trap” (sub nom the trap). The basics of the neutral zone trap was that a team would dump the puck into the offensive zone and then mount little or no forecheck in the offensive zone in favour of placing all of their players in the neutral zone in order to impede the other team from advancing through . . . [more]

Ever since things were invented, which is to say ever since the dawn of time, we’ve needed to take these things from one place to another. Using wheels to shift our stuff was a smart but later development and one that even now isn’t always available to us. So a great deal of the time we carry.

This business of carrying is so fundamental that we use the term in a large number of metaphorical ways, too: we “carry” tunes, conversations, genes, resentments, and legal cases, among other things. But I thought we’d take a look today at how in . . . [more]

The Lawyers Weekly recently included an article by Cristin Schmitz entitled Study sounds note of caution in ABS debate. Ms. Schmitz discusses a thoughtful paper by Nick Robinson who is a research fellow with the Harvard Program on the Legal Profession.

In an interview with Ms. Schmitz, Mr. Robinson said:

“I’ve been amazed in this debate how much each side kind of talks past each other, dismisses the concerns of the other side, or the point of the other side. I am a bit cautious about non-lawyer ownership in the paper, but I can also see in certain situations