Record labels, music publishers and digital music services said they had reached an agreement on proposed royalty rates for a range of online services, potentially making it easier to offer music in new ways via the Internet. The proposal would create guidelines for five new types of services, including online "locker" services such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes Match and Amazon.com Inc.'s Cloud Drive.
Microsoft Corp. said it won a ruling in a Seattle court effectively preventing phone company Motorola Mobility from immediately obtaining an injunction in Germany that could stop Microsoft from selling its Xbox and other software products there, due to a patent disagreement. Last week Microsoft announced plans to move its European distribution center to the Netherlands from Germany ahead of a German court decision expected on April 17, concerned that the court might side with Motorola and grant an injunction barring sales of its products in the country on the grounds that they infringe on a video technology patent owned by Motorola.
The Motion Picture Association of America is squaring off against a coalition of Internet giants and public interest groups over the key question of whether it's possible to directly infringe copyright by embedding an image or video hosted by a third party. A federal judge took that position last July, prompting a chorus of criticism.
Talk about the Chinese government's probes into Bo Xilai and his wife, Gu Kailai, reverberated around China's Internet despite strict censorship efforts, demonstrating a difficult task ahead for Communist Party officials seeking to restore an image of order and unity. Mr. Bo became the target of a corruption probe and his wife was named by authorities as a suspect in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.
A federal appeals court set back government efforts to prosecute corporate espionage with an opinion that explained its recent decision to throw out the conviction of a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc computer programmer. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the taking of source code by Sergey Aleynikov was not a crime under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to steal trade secrets. The court said the code did not qualify as stolen goods under another federal law.
The Justice Department filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Apple and major book publishers, charging that the companies colluded to raise the price of e-books in 2010. The lawsuit alleges that Apple and the publishers conspired to limit e-book price competition, causing “e-book consumers to pay tens of millions of dollars more for e-books than they otherwise would have paid.”
Eastern European hackers have stolen personal records for 780,000 people in the breach of a computer server in Utah. The list of victims include recipients of Medicaid and a health care program for low-income children in Utah, officials at Utah’s Department of Health said in a statement.
A U.S. appeals court rejected the government's broad reading of a computer fraud law to prosecute workers who steal from company computers, saying it could expose millions of Americans to prosecution for harmless activities at work. The 9-2 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco diverges from broader readings of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by three other federal appeals courts.
The Anonymous hacker collective, which in recent days has made headlines for attacking hundreds of Chinese government and commercial Websites, reportedly is turning its attention to U.S. trade organizations that have come out in support of stronger proposed cyber-security legislation. The group in recent days has launched denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on the Websites of TechAmerica and USTelecom, two trade groups that represent such tech heavyweights as IBM, Apple, AT&T and Verizon Communications, and have spoken out in support of the proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bipartisan bill designed to better enable U.S. government agencies and businesses to voluntarily share information about cyber-attacks.
Rumors that Iran plans to "shut down the Internet" and replace it with an entirely more controllable national intranet have been denied. The Agence France Presse reported earlier this week that millions of internet users in Iran will be permanently denied access, according to Reza Taghipour, the Iranian Information and Communications Technology Minister.
In the wake of a continuing series of reports of cyber attacks by the Anonymous hacking group against China, the Chinese government admitted that it had indeed recently fallen prey to those attacks. Anonymous supporters also claimed to attack Ugandan government websites over the weekend, and said that they planned to begin attacks on United Kingdom government servers.
Facebook's planned acquisition of Instagram is already raising privacy concerns, despite chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's pledge this morning that he wouldn't simply "integrate everything" into the larger social-networking site. "Part of the concern is that it's Facebook," says Chris Conley, an attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. "And their history of privacy and respecting user choices is mixed."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is raising some red flags about a new House bill aimed broadly at stopping cyber threats that, in practice, would go much further. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (H.R. 3523) was introduced by Rep. Mike Rogers and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger and “allows companies or the government free rein to bypass existing laws in order to monitor communications, filter content, or potentially even shut down access to online services for ‘cybersecurity purposes,’” according to the EFF.
A federal appeals court revived the bulk of language-software maker Rosetta Stone Inc.'s trademark infringement lawsuit against Google Inc. The opinion is the first appellate decision to address whether Google's sale of other companies' trademarks for sponsored links could give rise to liability for trademark infringement.
AOL agreed to sell a portfolio of over 800 patents, and license about 300 more, to Microsoft for $1.056 billion, amid an arms race within the technology industry over intellectual property. Under the terms of the transaction, AOL will retain a license for the patents it is selling, while Microsoft will receive a nonexclusive license for the technologies AOL is retaining.
Activists claiming affiliation with the hacking group Anonymous published about 2,700 emails purportedly between Tunisian Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali and other members of his government. A mask-wearing man in a video posted online said the publication had been prompted by recent events in Tunisia, notably the violent dispersal of a rally for unemployed people on Saturday in which several were injured.
A Marine who posted on Facebook that he would not follow orders from President Barack Obama should be dismissed from the military with a less-than-honorable discharge, a Marine Corps review board ruled. Gary Stein, 26, did not comment on the ruling, one day after his lawyers unsuccessfully sought to delay the review board by seeking an injunction in federal court in San Diego.
Three UK government websites, including one for the country's Prime Minister, were attacked by the hacker collective Anonymous in protest of extradition of British citizens to the United States and of a proposed law to broaden the snooping powers of the government there.
The U.S. government recently posted a project asking for the “Development of Tools for Extracting Information from Video Game Systems.” The listing was posted just two months ago, and last week a contract was signed with the California-based company Obscure Technologies.
For years, Mac users have been told that not only are they cooler than their PC counterparts, they are safer too. Apple has always held that computer viruses and malware only dogged its competitors. That is no longer the case, as security researchers discovered a new computer virus had infected half a million Mac users -- about half of them in the United States.
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