Tech Law

Sprint Nextel has filed suit against Vonage Holdings and other voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) startups, claiming those companies infringed on patents the telecommunications company holds for delivering VoIP traffic across networks. In addition to Vonage, the action filed by Sprint Nextel in U.S

Yahoo has put its money behind a team effort to bulk up the amount of valuable content available on the Web. The search engine company will foster the Open Content Alliance, a consortium set up to digitize materials in the public domain, such as classic books, and those published under the less-rest...

A lawsuit filed against Web sites that allege search engine results on Google.com were rigged by a placement firm is being watched throughout the Internet industry, as possibly having an impact on the free speech rights of bloggers, experts tell the E-Commerce Times. The Las Vegas-based search engin...

After months of complaints that its Google Library effort constituted a violation of copyright law, Google has been sued by a leading writer's association and three writers who claim that the search giant is infringing on the works of thousands of individual writers. The Authors Guild and three indi...

Microsoft has filed lawsuits against eight software re-sellers, saying that consumers helped lead them to the firms accused of selling pirated versions of the company's software. The software giant said the firms sold counterfeit or unauthorized copies of Microsoft Windows and related software compo...

In a case that underscores the growing pains of the online search business and the Web sector in fast-emerging China, Baidu.com has been ordered to stop providing referrals to music download sites offering certain copyright-protected songs. The order from a Chinese court came in conjunction with a c...

Attempts by lawmakers to ban Internet gambling by U.S. residents hit a roadblock this week when a bill that would have made it illegal for banks or credit card companies to pay for online gaming was halted. A procedural move scuttled an attempted by Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona to slip an a...

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors (NAR), saying that its Internet property listing policies deprived consumers of choice and possible savings. In a suit filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago, the DOJ said that even a recentl...

In the latest chapter of what's become an epic legal battle, Microsoft has filed suit against the European Union, hoping to have a court provide guidance on what parts of its source code it must reveal. Microsoft filed with the Court of First Instance for review of a provision of the sweeping anti-t...

File-sharing network Kazaa must alter its software to try to stop illegal music sharing, a federal judge in Australia ruled yesterday, but one analyst said the ruling won't change peer-to-peer file-swapping at all. "In the end it's about as relevant as anything else these industries have done. Tryin...

Publishers continue to line up in opposition to Google's ambitious efforts to digitize and make public the content of several major libraries, saying an olive branch recently extended by Google doesn't go far enough to assuage copyright concerns. Within the past week, the Association of Learned and ...

An adult publisher that has sued Google and Amazon for copyright infringement is now pressing for an injunction to stop the companies from linking to unauthorized copies of its soft-porn images. Perfect 10 has asked a court to set a Nov. 7 date for a hearing on its request for preliminary injunction...

America Online will pay New York state US$1.25 million and revamp its customer service approach to settle charges that it continued to bill some customers after they canceled their online access accounts. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said AOL agreed to pay the fine and to reimburse any st...

In a recent decision that might have long-term implications on how Internet search engines run their advertising programs, the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia released its written opinion on Government Insurance Company v. Google, Inc., et al., a case decided a while back. The C...

When WorldCom, the telecommunications giant, failed and was put into bankruptcy, the U.S. witnessed one of the largest accounting frauds in history. Former CEO, Bernie Ebbers, 63, was convicted of orchestrating this US$11 billion accounting fraud and was sentenced to 25 years in prison on July 13, 2...