Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's publisher, HarperCollins, and a U.S. news and gossip website have reached a settlement after it posted excerpts of her new book before the planned release. A Manhattan federal judge had ordered Gawker Media's website www.gawker.com to remove 21 pages it had posted online from Palin's second book.
The Federal Trade Commission said that it has reached settlements with the operators of websites that the agency claimed were deceptively touting free government grants for personal expenses and debts. As part of an investigation into scams related to the financial downturn, the FTC alleged that the operators promised consumers access to a "members only" website that included information on how they could obtain government grants.
In another blow to online file-sharing, a Swedish appeals court upheld the copyright convictions of three of the four founders of The Pirate Bay -- perhaps the world's most well-known and notorious file-sharing Web site. The court agreed with last year's ruling, which found Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom guilty of helping Pirate Bay users break Sweden's copyright law.
Federal authorities have shut down more than 70 websites in one the broadest actions yet against companies the government suspects of selling counterfeit or pirated products. Visitors to the affected sites -- which offer such diverse goods as scarves, golfing gear and rap music -- are greeted with a notice stating their domain names have been seized by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Telecommunications regulators postponed their December meeting, a move that could give them more time to consider whether they will take on controversial Web traffic rules. The Federal Communications Commission was scheduled to meet December 15, but the agency said it would postpone the meeting to December 21.
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is confident there will be no ban in India on its services, a senior RIM executive said. "There is no ban on BlackBerry, we are confident that there will be no ban in the future," Robert Crow, a vice president at RIM, told reporters in New Delhi.
A federal judge in New York issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting FilmOn.com Inc. from streaming copyrighted broadcast-television programming as the big networks intensify their fight to stop Internet companies from distributing their content online. Owners of the major broadcast-television networks are suing FilmOn.com, which streams broadcast TV stations online without their consent, grabbing free over-the-air broadcast signals and converting them to online streams.
Social games maker Zynga Game Network Inc. said it had settled a lawsuit it filed against Walt Disney Co.'s Playdom unit, ending a year-long battle over trade secrets with one of its closest rivals. Zynga, known for games like "Farmville" and "Mafia Wars," sued Playdom in September 2009, alleging that Playdom induced four former Zynga employees to steal trade secrets and use that information to help Playdom develop online social games to compete with Zynga's games.
Four public interest groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission urging the agency to investigate whether those offering online health information and services are engaging in unfair and deceptive advertising practices. In their complaint, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the World Privacy Forum alleged that groups and firms engaged in health marketing have established a "stealth interactive" marketing campaign aimed at promoting the use of specific brand drugs and persuading consumers to seek treatments for possible health conditions.
Security software manufacturer BitDefender released some statistics gleaned from Safego, a Facebook application that it offers to users of the social-network to keep an eye on their vulnerability to malware. The big finding: 20 percent of Facebook users are exposed to malicious posts in their "news feeds" of friends' activity, generally defined as posts that, when clicked on, result in "the user's account being hijacked and in malware being automatically posted on the walls of the respective user's friends."
Facebook is ramping up its considerable arsenal to silence Lamebook.com, the wisecracking website that curates and pokes fun at status updates, photos and comments from the giant social-networking site (with an emphasis on bawdy conversations and captions). Facebook blocked links to Lamebook from anywhere on its site, shut down Lamebook's fan page and was working diligently to prevent users from "liking" the company on its pages, according to Lamebook and a Facebook confirmation on TechCrunch.
Technology licensing firm Wi-Lan said it has initiated a patent infringement litigation against Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Charter Communications in a U.S. federal court. The Canadian company alleged that the three U.S. companies continued to infringe its patent by offering to sell, operate, advertise and market cable systems and cable modems.
Motorola Inc.’s Mobility unit filed a patent-infringement complaint against Microsoft Corp. with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, expanding a licensing feud between the two companies. Motorola Mobility, which makes handsets for mobile telephones, said Microsoft’s Xbox gaming system is infringing its patents and is seeking an order to block imports of the products.
In a call to arms, Internet founder Tim Berners-Lee urged web users to protect the net from becoming a fragmented territory. Citing threats from all the big players in the telecom space -- carriers, social networking sites and search engine operators -- Berners-Lee made his case in a new Scientific American article for Internet users to realize their control over the medium and protect it from commercial interests that could undermine its freedom.
Europe's effort to regulate online "cookies" is crumbling, exposing how tough it is to curb the practice of tracking Internet users' movements on the Web. Seeking to be a leader in protecting online privacy, the European Union last year passed a law requiring companies to obtain consent from Web users when tracking files such as cookies are placed on users' computers, but Internet companies, advertisers, lawmakers, privacy advocates and EU member nations can't agree on the law's meaning.
The UK's information commissioner has said that wi-fi data accidentally collected by Google's Street View cars will be deleted "as soon as possible." Deputy information commissioner David Smith told the BBC that there would be no further enquiries into the matter.
Democratic politicians are proposing a novel approach to cybersecurity: fine technology companies $100,000 a day unless they comply with directives imposed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Legislation would allow DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to levy those and other civil penalties on noncompliant companies that the government deems "critical," a broad term that could sweep in Web firms, broadband providers, and even software companies and search engines.
A federal judge ordered Gawker to take down excerpts the website posted from Sarah Palin's upcoming book until at least November 30. In his two-page decision, U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa told Gawker to cease "from continuing to distribute, publish or otherwise transmit pages" from Sarah Palin's "America by Heart" until a hearing scheduled for November 30.
A Chinese woman was sentenced to one year in a labor camp after she forwarded a satirical microblog message that urged recipients to attack the Japanese pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, human rights groups said. The woman, Cheng Jianping, 46, was accused of "disturbing social order" for resending a Twitter message from her fiancé that mocked young nationalists who held anti-Japanese rallies in several cities last month.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., says that the Senate will not act on cybersecurity legislation during the lame-duck session, punting the issue of how to improve the government's response to cyber threats to the next Congress. Lieberman made the comments during a hearing on the Stuxnet worm that has targeted the control systems of critical infrastructure facilities.
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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.