The Lori Drew finding her guilty of computer hacking because she may have broken MySpace's terms of service (without even having read them) was a classic example of prosecutors trying to stretch the law to punish someone who did something
A couple people have sent in this story, where the Canadian TV station Business News Network is apparently that are clips from BNN shows. The copyright claims may be valid, but what's odd is that they seem to be targeted
The newspaper people will tell you that if they are obliterated by the evil internets one of the big loses will be investigative journalism. If it hadn't been for those gritty investigative journalists the newspaper hires there'd be no Watergate,
In the US, thanks to safe harbor rules in the DMCA and the CDA, courts will often toss out misdirected lawsuits that go after a service provider for the actions of a user. To be honest, I've always questioned why
We've pointed out time and time again how silly it is for politicians to run around trying to , rather than just focusing on beefing up laws for reckless driving. There have been laws or proposals against driving while talking
A bunch of folks have been sending in variations on the news that Blizzard has . points out that Blizzard seems to be taking the same old tactic of claiming that this removal of a feature is for the of
Last month, we wrote about a lawsuit from JD Salinger over an attempt to publish a to Salinger's famous Catcher in the Rye written by Fredrik Colting under the pseudonym JD California. In a similar case, concerning a "parallel world"
It's been shown repeatedly that redlight cameras don't appear to make intersections any safer, but they do act as a nice revenue generator for cities. In fact, at times it's such a tempting revenue generator that city officials cannot resist
This is really unfortunate. eMusic used to be a great example of how treating customers right and with respect and trust could win over more customers -- but in the last month or so, it seems like the company is
What is it with the silly food related trademark battles we keep hearing about lately? First there were , then , and now whisky. You see, the Scotch Whisky Association takes these things seriously. Already you can't call something Scotch
We recently wrote about how many different sources Shakespeare used in , some of which he apparently copied verbatim. However, it seems quite likely that what Shakespeare did with those words created something wholly unique and valuable (at least, it's
It's interesting to see the logical pretzels that certain business execs will twist themselves into to defend a poor business model against one that customers enjoy much more. Take for example, the claim from cable firm Rainbow Media's CEO, Josh
Copyright system defenders often trot out the commonly accepted wisdom that copyright does not protect "ideas" and that there's an important "idea/expression" dichotomy, where it's only the specific expression that's protected, not the ideas. However, the reality is that both
Reader jprlk alerts us to the amusing news that Carleton University apparently with all of the details concerning an upcoming visit by the Emperor and Empress of Japan... and opened it up by saying:The Government of Japan respectfully requests that
There's a pretty simple rule of thumb in figuring out if a new business doesn't know how to approach its market. It's when it claims something along the lines of "well, this is an $x billion market, and we just
When the RIAA first Usenet.com, we thought it could make for an interesting case. After all, you could make a decent argument that there are a ton of non-infringing uses of Usenet. However, as the details came out, it became
Last week, Amazon decided to North Carolina affiliates due to proposed legislation that would have affiliates (really, advertisers) be considered as local "employees" for the sake of proving that Amazon had a business "nexus" in the state, and thus need
Lawyer Raymond Niro, for whom the term "patent troll" was apparently first coined, has been known to use the fact that he represents a company called Global Patent Holdings (GPH) to his advantage. GPH owns , but looking at it
alerts us to an appeals court ruling finding against a guy who claims that his firing was gender discrimination . The guy's entire case seems like a huge stretch. In the department he worked for, there was one computer shared
When Tony La Russa because there was a user impersonating him on the site (though, clearly labeled as being fake), we pointed out that La Russa was targeting the wrong party. At first we were afraid the same thing was
