This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. National Magazine   2. Ontario Condo Law Blog   3. Slater Vecchio Connected   4. Environmental Law and Litigation    5. First Reference

Those of us who keep our confidential information in the Cloud will be pleased with the announcement last week by Microsoft General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs, Brad Smith that “effective immediately” Microsoft will no longer inspect their customers’ private content.

The change is to be included in Microsoft’s Terms of Service and will be binding on Microsoft.

The new policy is the result of criticism of Microsoft over its investigators accessing Hotmail content in connection with alleged theft of Microsoft’s intellectual property.

Although, according to Smith, Microsoft was lawfully entitled under its terms of service . . . [more]

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This week's summaries concern: Workers' compensation / Copyright fees / Labour law:

Areas of law: Insurance law; Subrogation; Income replacement plan; Statutory exceptions ~The Insurance Act’s provisions excluding subrogation in cases where the insured receives income continuation or replacement payments apply where the party paying the benefits is an insurer under an insurance contract, but do not extend to employers ~

Requête en jugement déclaratoire afin de faire déclarer la Loi sur le recouvrement du coût des soins de santé et des dommages-intérêts liés au tabac inopérante. Rejetée.

The Ontario Court of Justice recently had occasion to consider the different grounds on which documentary evidence might be admitted or not admitted into evidence in a criminal case, in HMQ v Mondor.

Mr. Mondor was charged with accessing child pornography via a web site. The police had reconstituted the web site in order to trace certain purchases to the accused. As a result, the electronic records they used were not business records of the seller of the pornography for the purposes of s. 30 of the Canada Evidence Act. The Crown looked instead to what both it and . . . [more]

I’m guessing that of the readers of Slaw that there is a substantial subset that are fans of the BBC series Sherlock. So, fair warning if you haven’t seen the 3rd episode of Season 3 – “His Last Vow”, stop reading before you make the jump.

Now that I am sad that there will not be any new episodes for about two years, I have been thinking more about past episodes and I have a very simple question based on Episode 3. Let’s just say for the sake of my flight of fancy that Mary shoots Charles Augustus Magnussen and . . . [more]

Everybody wants to be somebody else. At least it sometimes seems that way to me. I must lack the drive to alterity that motivates a lot of folk: so, for instance, on Twitter I am @fodden — than which few handles could be more staid and stolid — while the Twitterverse is decorated with millions of colourful keladinyms, such as @DeweyDecibel, @sarahcuda, @brundle_fly, @TheTweetOfGod, @sassygal22 (arriving a little late, it seems), and @etcetera.

Now, were I to pick a nickname, I wouldn’t go for brevity but rather for sonority — what someone (Twain? Dickens?) describing a law firm name . . . [more]

Remember the childhood game of chasing all of your friends in an attempt to merely lay a finger on them so they could assume the role of the “it” person? It doesn’t feel much different these days when dealing with technology. There are a ton of “bad guys” trying to compromise your technology for a variety of reasons. Once your computer is infected it may be a long time before you are even aware of the compromise.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)

There are so many definitions of APT that it can make your head spin. It can refer to an . . . [more]

The English Law Commission earlier this week released its report on Contempt of Court: Court Reporting.

The report is part of the Commission’s Contempt of Court Project that also looked at juror misconduct on the Internet and contempt in the face of the court.

Under the Contempt of Court Act 1981, publication of material which has the effect of risking serious prejudice to active court proceedings can in some circumstances be punished as a contempt of court. Liability can arise irrespective of whether the publisher was aware that the publication would create such a substantial risk.

The Commission’s . . . [more]

Maybe it’s something that happens to your brain at 5,000 feet above sea level. Maybe it’s the fresh mountain air. Or maybe it’s the frontier, no-one’s-gonna-help-me-so-I-just-gotta-do-it-myself, spirit of the West. Whatever it is, some of the most entrepreneurial Canadian lawyers I’ve met to date, are from Calgary.

Over and over again I’ve heard that if you have a great idea in Calgary, you can find partners to help make it happen.

We live in an age of cloud computing, greying of the bar, and underserved populations living on mobile devices, and many of us have also been commenting on the . . . [more]