In a 100-page brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, Aereo, which streams over-the-air television programming with antenna/DVR technology, reiterated that it is not violating copyright law and that major broadcasters should not be paid for the programming that it is facilitating. "Under the Copyright Act, petitioners have no right to royalties at all for retransmissions of their content within the original broadcast market," Aereo wrote in the brief.
The European Union's highest court said that Internet service providers may have to block access to websites that infringe copyrights. The ruling, which confirms an opinion last year from the European Court of Justice's advocate general, could raise costs for Internet service providers in the 28-country EU, but leaves leeway for national courts to decide on the best course of action to fight copyright violations.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) introduced legislation to ban most forms of online gambling, ratcheting up a lobbying battle that pits casinos and lotteries against conservative donor Sheldon Adelson. “To have gaming on every smartphone on the country, I just think it’s a bad idea," Chaffetz said during a press event.
Leaks are par for the course when you're a huge company working on a new product, but one BlackBerry leaker seems to have gone too far. At least, CEO John Chen thinks so: He penned a post on the official Inside BlackBerry blog promising legal action against a leaker who "falsely posed as an employee of one of [BlackBerry's] carrier partners to obtain access to secured networks."
Brazil has made history with the approval of a groundbreaking post-Snowden Bill which sets out principles, rights and guarantees for Internet users. An overwhelming majority of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies voted in favor of the Marco Civil da Internet and its provisions around net neutrality, right to privacy and freedom of expression online.
In an unusual move, Google is responding directly to former TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington’s allegation that it accessed his Gmail account to root out his source for a major story. “While our terms of service might legally permit such access, we have never done this and it’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where we would investigate a leak in that way," Kent Walker, Google general counsel, said in a statement.
Target Corp. and Trustwave Holdings Inc., which provides credit card security services, have been sued by two banks for "monumental" losses they say card issuers will face because of the retailer's holiday season data breach. In a complaint filed in Chicago federal court, Trustmark National Bank and Green Bank NA accused the defendants of failing to properly secure customer data, enabling the theft of about 40 million payment card records plus 70 million other records, including addresses and phone numbers.
Turkey may be forced to turn the Twitter tap back on following a court ruling ordering an end to the ban. An administrative court in Turkey has issued a "stay of execution" on the decision to block access to Twitter in the country, Turkish news site Hurriyet Daily News reported.
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by New York businessman Paul Ceglia against Facebook Inc. and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, adopting findings by a magistrate judge that a purported contract entitling him to an ownership stake in the company was fake, according to court documents. Ceglia's 2010 lawsuit against Facebook and Zuckerberg underlay a subsequent federal prosecution in Manhattan, in which Ceglia was accused of forging a 2003 contract with Zuckerberg that supposedly entitled him to a part-ownership interest in the social networking company.
Count former President Bill Clinton among those who are skeptical of the new Obama administration plan to give up Internet oversight authority. Clinton talked in some detail about why the U.S. should retain oversight over Internet domain names and addresses during a panel at a weekend meeting sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative.
Apple and Amazon customers were notified of opportunities to get money back as a result of two legal settlements with the government. Both cases revolved around Apple.
The U.S. government will treat Bitcoin as property for tax purposes, applying rules it uses to govern stocks and barter transactions, the Internal Revenue Service said in its first substantive ruling on the issue. The IRS guidance will provide certainty for Bitcoin investors, along with income-tax liability that wasn’t specified before.
In a candy saga of a different kind, UK game studio ZeptoLab is challenging rival King's registration of the "candy" mark in the European Union. King is the soon-to-go-public studio behind Candy Crush Saga, the immensely popular mobile and social game with 97 million daily players.
Two men have pleaded guilty to federal charges that they illegally pirated more than 1 million copyrighted mobile applications. The convictions are the government’s first ever for distributing counterfeit mobile apps.
It looks like hackers have hit Basecamp with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and are demanding that the company pay a ransom. It’s not clear how much money the people responsible for the attack against Basecamp — which offers project management software along with the group chat program Campfire — are asking for.
Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said she declined in 2008 to limit the recruitment or hiring of Google Inc. employees after being contacted by two senior officials at the search engine company. Sandberg made the assertion in a court filing as Google, Apple Inc., Intel Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. prepare for a trial scheduled in May over claims they agreed not to recruit each other’s employees in violation of antitrust law.
Nokia does not expect to close the sale of its phone business to Microsoft until April as talks with Asian regulators drag on, it said on Monday, fueling speculation it may have to make technology patent concessions to get the deal done. "(The delay) is a bad sign. They have been discussing with authorities for quite a while already, and they still need more time," Nordea Markets analyst Sami Sarkamies said.
Billions of dollars are flowing into online advertising. But marketers also are confronting an uncomfortable reality: rampant fraud. About 36% of all Web traffic is considered fake, the product of computers hijacked by viruses and programmed to visit sites, according to estimates cited recently by the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group.
Google Inc. has declined Turkish government requests to remove YouTube videos alleging government corruption, people familiar with the matter said, the latest sign of resistance to a crackdown against social media led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkish authorities have in recent weeks asked Google to block the videos from YouTube's Turkish website, the people familiar with the matter said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of other CEOs had an “honest talk” with President Obama Friday afternoon at a hastily arranged meeting to discuss Silicon Valley’s continued unhappiness with U.S. government surveillance practices. White House officials characterized the meeting as a “continued dialogue” on the surveillance issue, but it appeared to be a direct reaction to a blistering post the Facebook co-founder published last week criticizing the administration’s efforts thus far to change the National Security Agency’s data collection practices.
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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.