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: Party to a crime / Crown duty to Métis / Bankruptcy / Automobile insurance / Injurious affection / Child welfare:One Sunday each month OnPoint Legal Research provides Slaw with an extended summary of, and counsel’s commentary on, an important case from the British Columbia, Alberta, or Ontario court of appeal.
VILARDELL v. DUNHAM, 2013 BCCA 65
Most people are completely unaware that their car has a black box. The device is known as an Event Data Recorder (EDR) and while it’s not yet mandatory, approximately 90% of cars on the road are equipped with this device. If you are wondering if your car has one, it should be disclosed in your owner’s manual.
EDRs are similar to commercial aircraft flight-data recorders, but don’t record voices or GPS locations and only retain information during a crash event, and from 5 to 30 seconds immediately before. Some of the recorded data includes:
Paper, that stuff our money used to be made out of, that intermediate medium between vellum and pixels — the afterlife for some 150,000,000 forty-foot trees each year in Canada alone. It’s so clearly doomed in many people’s minds that we’re able to look at it as something apart now, to see it, as it were, where before it was simply always and everywhere. So let’s look.
How Google sees it.
We’re getting close to April 1, so it’s appropriate to take a look at one of Google’s April Fool’s Day jokes: the one from 2007 on Gmail Paper: . . . [more]
Simon touched on Google’s latest offering Keep in a post yesterday, and how this product comes on the heels of Reader being abandoned. I’ve slowly come to grips with my Feeddemon and Google Reader partnership drawing to a close, but there’s something more frustrating at play here.
What I’m finding troubling is the lack of trust I now feel for Google and their commitment to “free”. Google was supposed to be the safe bet, but it clearly wasn’t. And now we’re forced to question what’s next? Gmail? Analytics? Apps? Feedburner? … We may just be a “spring cleaning” away from . . . [more]
It is astonishing to me that there are practising lawyers who take time away from helping clients to write (often foul-mouthed) blogs and comments attacking those who advocate different ways to deliver legal services. In the minds of these attackers, we have “666” tattooed to the backs of our heads.
The old saying, “Is this the hill I want to die on?” comes to mind for those with boundless energy to expend trash-talking people who think differently.
It’s as if the attackers don’t follow what’s happening in the world around them (which is also exceptionally poor risk management):
Megan Seto . . . [more]
Because law belongs to the people, the governments and courts that issue law must make it available to the people. This is a simple and widely accepted fact.
In practice, as governments and courts carry out their responsibilities to make law available, they do so in a wide variety of ways. For example, the digital versions of federal statutes available from Justice Canada are “official”, and they exist in forms and with rights extended to all and sundry that permit reuse and republication without royalty or permission. However, in some provincial jurisdictions, a surprising range of limitations exist. . . . [more]
I attended a presentation yesterday organized by the National Capital Association of Law Libraries (NCALL) where a representative from the Library of Parliament (LOP) outlined plans to make all older federal parliamentary debates available for free via PDF within the next few years.
Currently, pre-1900 debates are available in digital format on the Canadiana.org subscription website. Senate debates from 1996 onwards and House of Commons debates from 1994 onwards are available online on the parliamentary website.
LOP has teamed up with Canadiana.org in a five-year collaborative effort to create a free-of-charge portal that will offer searchable access to federal . . . [more]
Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.
Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville
New York: 1853, Putnam’s Magazine (Public domain)
[A LibriVox recording of the novella is also available.]
. . . Now my original business—that of a conveyancer and title hunter, and drawer-up of recondite documents of all sorts—was considerably increased by receiving the master’s office. There was now great . . . [more]
“Would you pick up a half bottle of beer left on the pavement and drink it?”
This question was put by Rob Cotton, CEO of NCC Group , to a BBC Radio4 presenter when he was discussing the risks of using free wifi hotspots in cafes, etc. Perhaps the image was a bit extreme, but it caught my attention, as intended. He was drawing a picture of the not so pristine world of unsecured free wifi hotspots, and the lure of joining the Cloud wherever you find yourself. The premise is that you should think about what you search, or . . . [more]
This is an eventful week so far for those interested in US copyright matters. As many will have read, on Tuesday the Supreme Court of the US released a 6-3 ruling in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., in which it addressed the reach of the first-sale doctrine in respect of works published for foreign markets, or—stated another way—the reach of a copyright owner’s control over those products. Twitter continues to show joy over the decision among librarians and consumers of information, along with dismay among others concerned with importation and copyright control.
In Opinion analysis: Justices reject . . . [more]
This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada | Ce projet a été rendu possible en partie grâce au gouvernement du Canada
