Tech Law

Amazon.com has agreed to pay US$40 million to settle a year-old patent infringement lawsuit just days before the case was set to go to trial. Amazon will make the one-time payment to Soverain Software of Chicago. In exchange, Soverain agreed to drop all claims that Amazon violated five of its "core ...

A new bill introduced by a Democratic Senator from Arkansas aimed at taxing online porn sites -- at a 25 percent rate -- is raising Constitutional concerns among legal scholars. The bill is called the Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005 (S 1507), and has been referred to the Senate Fin...

Two advertisers have filed a lawsuit against Google, saying the search giant did not live up to its promise to cap the amount of charges advertisers could incur in any given day. The suit was filed in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County and seeks class action status, which would e...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided today that telephone companies that offer high-speed Internet access do not have to share their wire lines with other DSL providers. By classifying DSL as a information service, the FCC freed telecoms from federal telecommunications regulations. Th...

Sloth can be a deadly sin, or at least a potentially litigious one, and the rise of blogging on the Internet has peaked concern about this pitfall. The issue arises because bloggers, many or most of them amateurs, often overdose on cut-and-paste editing, which can result in copyright violations, Pau...

Online auctioneer eBay this week strengthened rules to prevent fraud on its site, as cases continue to emerge of disreputable sellers misrepresenting the products they market there. One allegedly fraudulent eBay merchant was sued this week by the Missouri Attorney General, Jay Nixon, after an indivi...

New data suggest legal downloading of digital music is experiencing dramatic growth worldwide, with the number of songs legally acquired online tripling in the first six months of 2005. The report said 180 million tracks were downloaded globally between January and the end of June. The same study, c...

A recent survey in the United States has highlighted the growing trend of employers to electronically monitor employees in the workplace. According to the 2005 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute, employers ...

Should bloggers receive federal legal protection so they can shield sources from overzealous prosecutors? Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), believe so. But others in the Congressional leadership with more influence aren't so sure. Two pieces of legislation, S 340 and HR ...

Agents from the European Commission (EC) have conducted surprise inspections of several offices of leading computer chip maker Intel and other high-technology firms, apparently seeking evidence of antitrust behavior. Intel said that in keeping with company policy, it was cooperating with investigato...

Escalating a long-running battle over current and future wireless technology, Broadcom has filed suit against cell phone technology rival Qualcomm, saying that company engaged in anti-competitive behavior in order to help its mobile voice and data standard gain traction. Broadcom said in the federal...

Continuing its practice of settling lawsuits in order to focus on the competitive threats it faces, Microsoft has agreed to pay IBM US$775 million to settle a long-simmering antitrust lawsuit. The action was a private suit that was brought in conjunction with the government action that resulted in a...

Pop-up advertising on the Web might be annoying, but not as annoying as what would happen if trademark law were used to squash them, according to a federal appellate court in New York. The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals this week upended a decision by a lower court that used trademark law to bloc...

Hard on the heels of a partial victory for music and movie studios before the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has continued to pressure consumers who it says illegally swap music, filing a new batch of more than 700 copyright infringement la...

Serving a victory to the entertainment industry and a potentially damaging blow to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing firms, the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that P2P firms can be sued if they encourage the use of their products to illegally swap copyrighted music and movies. The unanimous court ruli...