by Karen Sawatzky | Mar 20, 2018 | Caselaw, Civil Litigation, Legal Research, United States
Most of the time when I see the word “bot” I think of Russian trolls influencing the U.S. election. But not this time! USA Today investigative reporter Brad Heath has created an automatic Twitter bot that follows selected U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Courts of Appeal, and Federal District Court cases of note and posts documents from new docket entries to Twitter.
In its documentation, the bot is described as follows:
The bot uses PACER RSS feeds to gather the latest filings from 74 U.S. District Courts and five federal courts of appeals and stores the docket entries in a database. It matches new filings against a preselected list of major cases, scrapes matching documents from PACER, uploads them to a DocumentCloud project and posts the results on Twitter.
You must have a PACER account in order to access the documents – we do! So if you want the latest filing on United States v. AT&T and Time Warner, or any other U.S. court case you’re watching, let us know if we can help. There may be a fee for retrieving documents.
And follow Big Cases on Twitter for up-to-date notification.
h/t to Internet for Lawyers.
by Allyssa McFadyen | Mar 9, 2018 | Commentary, Law Society Publications, Legal Research
The latest edition of Business Law from Manitoba eLaw is now live! Some of the articles in Issue No. 82, March 2018 include:
- “Something More Than Nothing” Required to Discharge Duty: SCC
- BLA Does Not Apply to Contracts or Work Related to Hydro Project: MBQB
- Oppression Remedy Not Suited to Addressing Family Dispute: MBQB
- Legislative Update
- Federal Budget 2018
- Consultation on Modernizing The Builders’ Liens Act: MLRC
- Consultation Paper on Reviewing AML and ATF Regimes: Department of Finance
by Karen Sawatzky | Feb 28, 2018 | Civil Litigation, Commentary, Law Society Publications
There’s been a lot of new developments on the litigation front since the last update in December. Highlights from Issue No. 84, February 2018:
- Modified Test for Mandatory Interlocutory Injunction: SCC
- Public Interest Standing and Supplementing Reasons: SCC
- No Realistic Chance of Success: MBCA/MBQB
- Careless Smoking Negligent: MBQB
- Recent Flood Claims
- Further Amendments to Court of Queen’s Bench Rules
- Court of Queen’s Bench Practice Direction
- Facilitating the Management of Multi-jurisdictional Class Actions: CBA
- Recommended Reading
by Allyssa McFadyen | Feb 26, 2018 | Copyright, Intellectual Property Law, Legal Research
In honour of Fair Use/Fair Dealings week, here are some of the resources available in the Great Library:
Print
- The Annotated Copyright Act by Normand Tamaro (Thomson Reuters, 2017)
- Intellectual Property Litigation : Forms and Precedents by Paul V. Lomic (LexisNexis, 2016)
- Intellectual Property Journal (Vol. 1-28, 1984-2016)
E-Books
*You must be signed in to the Law Society of Manitoba’s Member’s Portal before you are able to view these e-resources. If you are outside of Manitoba, please get in touch with your respective Law Society Library.
Articles & Websites
The following resources are freely available online for anyone to view:
- Fair Dealing Canada – Resource hub for fair dealing in Canada
- Michael Geist‘s website
- Howard Knopf’s website, “Excess Copyright”
- Here Come The Copyright Bots For Hire, With Lawyers In Tow by Steven Mendelez
- “Anyone can now find infringers, send take-down requests, and quickly demand thousands in damages. Can the trolls be far behind?”
- The Saga of Canada’s “Making Available Right” in Three Acts by Cameron Hutchison
- “Enter our protagonist – the “making available right” [MAR] – which effectively identifies the point of upload as the situs of infringement, thus promising to remedy this situation. The uploader is the one who perpetrates infringement and this entity is now deterred from doing this for fear of being sued. […] it matters not whether the work uploaded is ultimately streamed or copied – we have “our man” and we do not need to worry about those downstream parties.”
- Slaw also has an entire category dedicated to Intellectual Property
by Allyssa McFadyen | Feb 22, 2018 | Copyright, Intellectual Property Law
Next week is Fair Use/Fair Dealings Week, a week to inform, educate, and celebrate the concepts of Fair Use (United States) and Fair Dealings (Canada) as well as in other countries.
As described by fairuseweek.org,
Fair use and fair dealing are essential limitations and exceptions to copyright, allowing the use of copyrighted materials without permission from the copyright holder under certain circumstances. Fair use and fair dealing are flexible doctrines, allowing copyright to adapt to new technologies. These doctrines facilitate balance in copyright law, promoting further progress and accommodating freedom of speech and expression.
As copyright, fair dealing, and education are some of the core values of Canadian libraries, the Great Library hopes this can be a week to help inform users about fair dealing and how it intersects with clients, and promote a better understanding of copyright law and intellectual property as well. The issue has been litigated in Federal Court as recently as last July, between York University and Access Copyright, the collective which collects royalties on behalf of its authors.
Next week we will be putting up a display in the library, as well as including e-resources that members of the Law Society can access online. Stay tuned!
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