Tech Law

Some Internet security experts don't place much hope for pending antiphishing legislation to do much to prevent ID theft and related scams. They view the prospect of new laws as being too little, too late to stop an out-of-control problem. Phishing scams trick e-mail recipients into clicking a link ...

Culminating its months-long investigation into the theft of Microsoft's viciously guarded Windows source code, the FBI has arrested a Connecticut man it said used a Web site to distribute parts of the operating system. William O. Genovese Jr., 27, faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of US$250,...

An alleged Microsoft hacker was arrested yesterday on charges that he illegally sold a secret source code used for Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 programs. The United States Attorney's Office in Manhattan charged William P. Genovese, Jr., 27, of Connecticut, with unlawfully distributing a trade sec...

"Guilty" on all three counts was the finding of the Virginia jury on November 3 in the nation's first felony spam prosecution. The greatest shock was when the jury returned a sentence of nine years against Jeremy Jaynes when many on the jury did not even know what spam was prior to the eight-day jur...

In just the latest example of a technology company aggressively protecting its intellectual property, Toshiba has filed lawsuits alleging that Hynix memory chips violate Toshiba patents. Japan's Toshiba filed suits in Tokyo and in U.S. District Court in Texas charging patent infringement. The Japane...

In one of the largest instances to date of widespread big-rigging on auction site eBay, eight sellers have been ordered to pay US$90,000 in fines and restitution after admitting to engaging in practices that artificially drove up the prices of their auctions. The sellers began to pay restitution to ...

Microsoft has agreed to pay Novell US$536 million to settle a long-simmer private antitrust claim over its NetWare operating system, a deal that also calls for Novell to withdraw from the European antitrust proceedings against Microsoft. Microsoft said the deal, which came about after lengthy privat...

Amazon.com, the owner of the "1-Click Shopping" patent, is no stranger to either side of patent infringement battles. Now it finds itself in yet another dispute, this one against Cendant Publishing. Cendant filed suit in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Del., Oct. 29 against the e-commerce giant c...

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) -- following in the footsteps of its recording industry counterpart, the RIAA -- announced today its intent to file a series of lawsuits aimed at stopping the sharing of films over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The MPAA claims to lose more than US$3 mi...

An "information age undercover investigation" led by the U.S. Secret Service has arrested 28 individuals in eight states and six foreign countries who were accused of being involved in a global cyber organized-crime network. Charges against the suspects include identity theft, computer fraud, credit...

Verizon Wireless and Nextel Communications announced yesterday that they have agreed to dismiss their pending lawsuits against each other. As part of the settlement, Verizon will drop its opposition to a July ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that awarded a valuable radio-wave spectrum...

Hundreds of separate instances of electronic voting problems were reported in the U.S. during yesterday's elections, enough to give critics of e-voting ammunition for their continued battle against its use, but not nearly enough to affect the outcome of the election, as some had feared. In a press c...

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has revived its long-running campaign to stem file-swapping through legal action, suing 750 alleged file sharers across the U.S. for copyright infringement. The latest batch of suits included 25 users on 13 university campuses around the country a...

Most businesspeople get a knot in their stomachs when they think of bankruptcy. The reasons for this, I believe, are twofold: They don't have the basic knowledge about the implications of bankruptcy; and they feel a loss of control whenever they think about it. This article attempts to dispel the my...

A barrage of lawsuits against several dozen defendants have been filed in federal courts by an antispam alliance of the nation's leading Internet service providers in the latest crackdown on e-mail spam. The lawsuits were filed by Earthlink, America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo. They represent the se...