Nicole Perlroth of the New York Times suggests this week that the era of the BlackBerry may be over. In fact, having a BlackBerry today may even carry a stigma:

BlackBerrys may still linger in Washington, Wall Street and the legal profession, but in Silicon Valley they are as rare as a necktie.

 But even in these establishments, change is happening:

Goldman Sachs recently gave its employees the option to use an iPhone. Covington & Burling, a major law firm, did the same at the urging of associates. Even the White House, which used the BlackBerry for security reasons, recently

The Articling Task Force reported this morning.

The Executive Summary reads: . . . [more]

A must see for law librarians came across my Twitter stream yesterday. ILTA and AALL have partnered to produce a white paper called The New Librarian. The content is great with articles by some folks well known in the legal information community. One of the really cool things is that the paper was created with Uberflip.

Check it out. . . . [more]

The Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) has made a significant archive of videos available online. A consortium of for-profit cable companies, CPAC provides free, not-for-profit video coverage of the daily grind of federal political and legal life in Canada, filming Parliamentary debates, commission hearings, and Supreme Court hearings.

At the moment it’s not possible to know the exact scope of the archive — at least, I couldn’t find much in the way of precise explanatory material about dates and coverage. The viewer can choose to enter the archive via one of a number of tabs: Latest, House, Senate, By Show, . . . [more]

Last week, I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours digging through old Debates of the Senate so that I could pinpoint references I had made in my current thesis to material I read 30 or 40 years ago. One of the points for which my browsing these old debates brought to mind was that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has what I will call a “pre-history” that is very little known.

(I generally dislike the term “pre-history” because I’ve mainly encountered it in the context of Indigenous experience before the coming of the white man. . . . [more]

The B.C. Court of Appeal formally launched its e-Filing program today. The Supreme Court of British Columbia and the Provincial Court of British Columbia have offered e-filing since June 2007, bringing today’s move up to all three levels of court in the province.

Chief Justice Lance Finch stated in the Press Release:

Court of Appeal e-filing expands access to the court for litigants outside B.C.’s major urban centres by allowing parties to file documents without attending at the court. When a document is e-filed, it also becomes instantaneously available to litigants and the public through the electronic registry, Court . . . [more]

According to Michael Geist today on his blog, the Ontario Public School Board Association is advising school boards in Ontario to prepare to stop using Access Copyright for copyright licensing next year. They are following a legal opinion obtained by the Counsel of Ministers of Education, Copyright, that advises any material copied in Canadian K-12 schools either already has the correct permissions or would fall under fair dealing.

This follows from five Supreme Court of Canada decisions on copyright that came down this summer which gave guidance on determining fair dealing (see Martin Kratz’ coverage in his Ensuring the Balance . . . [more]

“…being in accordance with the actual state or conditions; conforming to reality or fact…real; genuine; authentic; being or reflecting the essential or genuine character of something.”

I was in court last week and obtained an order that transferred real property from the registered owner to my client as an equitable remedy based on a constructive trust. There was some urgency: the property was uninsured and there was a perceived danger of other pending judgments against the legal owner which might be registered against the property.

Recognizing this, the judge wrote out a judgment by hand (about half a page of . . . [more]

According to Martindale-Hubbell’s latest Canadian research, at least 20% of law firms’ total revenue comes from referrals (http://www.martindale-hubbell.ca/lawyer-to-lawyer-canada). One in ten of the 70 firms surveyed earned 50% of their revenue from referrals. With this order of magnitude, you would think that nurturing referral relationships would be pretty high on any firm’s marketing agenda. However, 14% of respondents don’t even track their referral sources.

I found this particularly interesting, having just completed some research on referrals myself. I found, as did Martindale-Hubbell, that the key quality referring professionals are looking for is a mixture of competence, expertise, and . . . [more]

Nearly two years ago — a lifetime on the internet — Royal Assent was given to Canada’s anti-spam law (otherwise known as An Act to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by regulating certain activities that discourage reliance on electronic means of carrying out commercial activities, and to amend the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act, the Competition Act, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and the Telecommunications Act, S.C. 2010, c. 23. The CRTC was given power to make regulations under the Act, which it has done, although they have not yet . . . [more]

If you could detect an attack on your computer system and defend against it, would you want to do it? should you be allowed to do it? What if defending meant harming the computer of the attacker? What if defending meant at least getting information about intermediate computers between the attacker’s and yours?

There are legal and ethical questions here. A review of the ethical ones appears in Stewart Baker’s blog, Skating on Stilts. (He is a former General Counsel of the US National Security Agency, among other high-level achievements.)

Mr Baker argues for private defence as well as . . . [more]

The various lawsuits by authors, publishers, and photographers against the Google Library Project since 2004 have been commented here on Slaw repeatedly by several different contributors.

Jonathan Band recently developed an infographic to help depict the various developments, and is available for download here.

The Google Books Litigation Family Tree . . . [more]