The Supreme Court agreed to review a challenge to California's ban on the sale of violent video games to minors. Hot on the heels of overturning a congressional ban on videos depicting animal cruelty, justices said they would consider the constitutionality of California's 2005 law sometime during the term that starts in October.
Israel will begin allowing people to bring Apple iPads into the country, two weeks after customs began confiscating the tablet computers for fear they would interfere with other wireless devices. "Following the completion of intensive technical scrutiny, Israel Minister of Communications Moshe Kakhlon approved the import of (the) iPad to Israel," the Communications Ministry said in a statement.
American college students are hooked on cellphones, social media and the Internet and showing symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addictions, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Maryland who asked 200 students to give up all media for one full day found that after 24 hours many showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety along with an inability to function well without their media and social links.
A Chinese insurance company said it will appeal a court order to pay damages to Microsoft Corp. for intellectual property infringement, and accused the software giant of acting in a monopolistic manner. A Shanghai court ordered Dazhong Insurance Co. to pay 2.17 million yuan ($318,000) to Microsoft for using unlicensed copies of the U.S. company's software.
Network neutrality rules adopted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission could lead to the loss of more than 340,000 jobs in the broadband industry over the next 10 years, with few offsetting Web content jobs, according to a new study funded by a group opposed to the proposed rules. If the FCC adopts the net neutrality rules it is now considering, close to 1.5 million jobs across the U.S. economy could be put in jeopardy by 2020, and revenue growth in the broadband industry would slow by about one-sixth during that time frame, said the study, by Coleman Bazelon, a telecom economist with The Brattle Group.
Silicon Valley police are investigating what appears to be a lost Apple iPhone prototype purchased by a gadget blog, a transaction that may have violated criminal laws, a law enforcement official said. Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney's office, the source said.
Sarah Palin, speaking to reporters after testifying against a Tennessee man accused of breaking in to her personal e-mail account, dismissed the defense's argument that the incident was nothing more than "silly prank." "I don't think an illegal action like this is a prank," Palin said after the courtroom appearance in Knoxville, Tennessee.
As the country was sinking into its worst financial crisis in more than 70 years, Security and Exchange Commission employees and contractors cruised porn sites and viewed sexually explicit pictures using government computers, according to an agency report obtained by CNN. "During the past five years, the SEC OIG (Office of Inspector General) substantiated that 33 SEC employees and or contractors violated Commission rules and policies, as well as the government-wide Standards of Ethical Conduct, by viewing pornographic, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images using government computer resources and official time," said a summary of the investigation by the inspector general's office.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk disappointed some at the Consumer Electronics Association dinner Wednesday night by failing to discuss the draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement released the same day, which has come under fire by some consumer advocates for failing to shut the door on harsh punishments for copyright infringers. In a keynote address, Kirk reitered the Obama administration's commitment to combating copyright breaches and intellectual property theft.
The National Security Agency has been conducting its 10th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition that pits students from a series of military academies against each other -- and against the competition's leaders at NSA -- in a bid to see who has the best cyberdefense skills. The idea? To "build and defend computer networks against simulated intrusions by the National Security Agency/Central Security Services Red Team."
Data protection authorities from a range of countries held a teleconference to discuss how they can work together to protect what they see as a steady erosion of privacy by social networking services, and the European Union too is studying what role it can play. They may not be able to hold the social networking wave back, but policymakers are looking at what they can do to limit what they see as the "Big Brother"-like role of some sites.
The Obama administration is supporting a compromise on patent overhaul legislation unveiled last month by Senate Judiciary Committee leaders, CongressDaily reported. In a letter to Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking member Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said the compromise "improves the reported bill and incorporates critical elements of patent reform."
Zeus, a virus that steals online banking details from infected computer users, is more powerful than ever, warns a web security company. Trusteer says it has spotted the Trojan virus in one of every 3,000 of the 5.5m computers it monitors in the US and UK.
North Carolina's Department of Revenue called a lawsuit filed against the agency by Amazon.com Inc. "misleading," and said it wasn't violating the First Amendment rights of shoppers by asking for data to aid in tax collection. The state said that in its effort to collect sales taxes it routinely requires "general information" about transactions with out-of-state retailers, including the purchaser's name, address and the item's purchase price.
U.S. regulators proposed to make broadband access the focus of subsidized telecommunications for the poor and rural areas, a first step in tackling an ambitious plan to provide high-speed Internet to all Americans. The Federal Communications Commission unanimously proposed the shift in the goal of the Universal Service Fund despite a recent court ruling that called into question the agency's authority over the Internet.
YouTube has recently begun removing videos that feature content from Constantin Films' 2004 film, "Der Untergang" ("Downfall"), despite the fact that many of these videos are parodies and thus constitute fair use of the material. The "Downfall," or Hitler-parody, meme has been, arguably, a viral spate of publicity for Constantin Films in the past few years.
Technology companies and public interest groups are warning that an international trade agreement being drafted could expose Internet access providers, Web search engines and other online businesses to damaging legal risks. The U.S. and nearly a dozen trading partners released the current version of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, after mounting complaints that negotiations have happened behind closed doors. An eighth round of talks was held last week in New Zealand.
Google plans to publish data on the number of requests it receives from governments to either remove content or identify specific users. Google will host a page on its site that reveals the number of times a government has requested data on a specific user or asked Google to remove a piece of content from its network of sites, such as search, YouTube, or Blogger.
Brazil has supplanted Germany as the globe's No. 3 origination source of malicious net traffic, while India has zoomed to No. 5, according to rankings released today in Symantec's 2009 Global Internet Security Threat Report. The United States and China maintained the first and second spots respectively in the rankings as the top nations of origin for various types of cyberattacks in 2009 compared to 2008.
Three months after Eastman Kodak sued Apple for patent infringement, Apple has filed a countersuit that accuses the film and imaging company of violating two of its own digital photography patents. Apple accused Kodak of infringing patent 6,031,964, a "system and method for using a unified memory architecture to implement a digital camera device," and patent RE38,911, a "modular digital image processing via an image processing chain with modifiable parameter controls," according to details from the suit.
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The GigaLaw Firm helps companies of all sizes protect their brands online, using domain name dispute policies – such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – and other legal tools available to copyright and trademark owners on the Internet.