Tech Law

Federal prosecutors in New Jersey on Tuesday charged three men in a $2 million identity theft scheme to hack corporate computer systems and blast spam messages to more than 60 million people. The defendants face up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines on wire fraud charges, and up to five yea...

The Seattle City Council this week approved an ordinance that will allow drivers for Uber and Lyft to form unions, becoming the first U.S. city to pass such legislation. The City Council voted 9-0 in favor of the ordinance, which doesn't require the mayor's signature to pass. Drivers for Uber and ot...

Australian police on Wednesday raided the home of a shadowy figure who just hours earlier had been outed as one of the original founders of bitcoin digital currency in two separate media reports. Identified in multiple media reports, Australian entrepreneur Craig Steven Wright was said to be the man...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., on Tuesday reintroduced a bill that would require technology companies to alert law enforcement of certain activities that might be related to terrorist threats. Cosponsored by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the Requiring Reporting of Online Terrorist Activity Act would ...

Samsung and Apple last week filed a court document indicating the companies had come to an agreement under which Samsung will pay Apple $548 million toward partial resolution of an epic legal dispute. At the heart of the conflict were Apple's allegations that Samsung effectively had stolen the techn...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that Google has used personal student data mined from its school Chromebook distribution, and requesting an investigation and an injunction against the practice. The EFF also launched its Spyi...

Not a day passes without mention of the Internet of Things in the media, as it appears to expand exponentially. Roughly 6.4 billion things will be connected to the Internet in 2016, at a rate of 5.5 million new things per day, according to Gartner. More than 20 billion devices will be in use by 2020...

A District Court in Stockholm, Sweden, last week ruled against an international group of content providers who sought to force a local ISP to block The Pirate Bay, a file-sharing site, said lawyers for the plaintiffs. The content providers -- including Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Nord...

BlackBerry on Monday announced that it will cease operations in Pakistan at the end of the year. The move is the result of a shutdown order from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which in July notified the company that its BlackBerry Enterprise Service servers would no longer be allowed to o...

The Austrian Supreme Court will consider whether a suit against Facebook Ireland can proceed as a class action. Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems brought the suit to challenge the transfer of private data to Facebook's European subsidiary in Ireland. The Vienna Court of Appeals previously had ru...

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman this week sought an injunction to keep DraftKings and FanDuel from operating in the state, according to press reports. He also subpoenaed Yahoo as part of his effort to end the operation of daily fantasy sports platforms in New York, press reports said....

Microsoft on Wednesday said it would offer its Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM cloud services to business clients using two Germany-based data centers hosted by a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. The arrangement will protect the integrity and privacy of customer data, the company said. The data ce...

Four former delivery drivers for Amazon Prime Now, or APN, last week filed a lawsuit against Amazon, arguing they should have been classified as employees rather than independent contractors. The suit also names Scoobeez, the courier service through which they worked for Amazon; ABT Holdings, Scoobe...