To reinforce the rule of law and for the law to be widely known it must be openly and frequently brought into public view and made part of public discourse. It will be a long time before we see Donoghue v Stevenson “trending” on Twitter, or receiving tens of thousands of “likes” on Facebook. But sudden changes or dramatic turns in legal understanding brought about by a court judgment will and frequently do attract significant attention in both venues. And it is this attention, whether triggered by a court’s own twitter account or the accounts of court observers that enhance awareness of the changes and facilitate the process for understanding “new” law.

1. Courts providing briefs to commercial vendors  the US perspective, This post also provides links to the copyright question noted as the second issue.
2. Question of copyright in briefs, factums, and other court documents prepared by lawyers/law firms. For developments in Canada check out the SLAW post.

Read more on their website: Courts of Nova Scotia Enter The “Twitterverse”. Also from Slaw, Twitter in the Court! Twitter in the Court! by David Bilinsky.

51 – It is common ground, first, that the injunction requiring installation of the contested filtering system would involve a systematic analysis of all content and the collection and identification of users’ IP addresses from which unlawful content on the network is sent. Those addresses are protected personal data because they allow those users to be precisely identified.

52 – Secondly, that injunction could potentially undermine freedom of information since that system might not distinguish adequately between unlawful content and lawful content, with the result that its introduction could lead to the blocking of lawful communications. Indeed, it is not contested that the reply to the question whether a transmission is lawful also depends on the application of statutory exceptions to copyright which vary from one Member State to another. Moreover, in some Member States certain works fall within the public domain or can be posted online free of charge by the authors concerned.

53 – Consequently, it must be held that, in adopting the injunction requiring the ISP to install the contested filtering system, the national court concerned would not be respecting the requirement that a fair balance be struck between the right to intellectual property, on the one hand, and the freedom to conduct business, the right to protection of personal data and the freedom to receive or impart information, on the other.

54 – In the light of the foregoing, the answer to the questions submitted is that Directives 2000/31, 2001/29, 2004/48, 95/46 and 2002/58, read together and construed in the light of the requirements stemming from the protection of the applicable fundamental rights, must be interpreted as precluding an injunction made against an ISP which requires it to install the contested filtering system.

CanLII continue’s to innovate:  watch the video on on their new tool to launch Canlii from any web page with a browser plug-in.