Tech Law

Jury selection began Monday in the latest lawsuit between Apple and Samsung, being heard before Judge Lucy Koh in a United States District Court in San Jose, Calif. Apple is seeking about $2 billion in damages from Samsung for infringing its patents on smartphone and tablet technology, while Samsung...

The United States will tax bitcoin and other virtual currencies as property, the IRS announced on Tuesday. Virtual currency will be treated as property for U.S. federal tax purposes, and transactions in virtual currency will be subject to general tax principles. Taxpayers who receive virtual currenc...

Although they previously came to an arrangement regarding stronger broadband service delivery, Netflix and Comcast last week sparred over the issue of Net neutrality in a public forum. Net neutrality -- or "open Internet" -- is the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally by Inter...

Google and Viacom have settled a long-running copyright suit, after a federal judge twice threw out the case. "Google and Viacom today jointly announced the resolution of the Viacom vs. YouTube copyright litigation," the companies said in a brief joint statement. "This settlement reflects the growin...

Surfing the Internet last year was a dangerous proposition. On average, 200 samples of malicious software were collected every minute by McAfee Labs, the company reported Monday in its threat report for the Q4 2013. All kinds of Internet nastiness increased last year -- from ransomware and suspiciou...

The drama surrounding Mt. Gox, once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, has intensified. The company on Sunday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States -- less than two weeks after taking a similar action in Tokyo, where it's headquartered. It apparently made this move to freeze a laws...

It is hard to figure out which is growing at a faster pace -- movement to the cloud or cybercrime. Cybercrime is following the data to the cloud, according to reports, to find and steal cloud data of hotel records, credit card information, and maybe even corporate secrets and the client files of law...

Workers at a factory in China are on strike after rejecting compensation plans offered as a result of IBM's $2.3 billion deal to sell its low-end server business to Lenovo. More than 1,000 workers brought production to a halt Monday at IBM's International Systems Technology Company server-making fa...

Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in Tokyo, Just days after going offline following the publication on Scribd of an internal memo that alleged hackers had stolen nearly 745,000 Bitcoins from its servers over the years. Blaming a weakness in the compan...

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly have submitted four proposals to reform the National Security Agency's phone surveillance program. The recommendations come well before the March 28 deadline set by President Obama. Three deal with havi...

The explosion of the Internet of Things, or IoT, promises great opportunities for improving quality of life -- but also for creating both seen and unforeseen dangers. The IoT generally refers to a network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to sense, communicate and interact with th...

HP's problems following its 2011 purchase of Autonomy for $11.1 billion are getting worse. Various documents and internal emails reportedly indicate HP knew about the existence of loss-making hardware sales Autonomy allegedly used to bolster its revenue figures well before May 2012, when HP claimed ...

After months of being courted by both Comcast and Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable has agreed to be purchased by Comcast for $45.2 billion in stock. The deal, if approved by the United States Department of Justice and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, will create the biggest broad...

Federal agencies spend considerable portions of their budgets on their legal offices. For example, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded a $1.1 billion multiyear contract in 2013 for a wide range of information technologies and legal support services. Yet legal staffs across the federal government ...

In the wake of revelations that the U.S. and UK governments regularly monitor private communications, a number of countries are considering a new type of law called "data localization." In the simplest of terms, data localization laws would require that businesses that operate on the Internet -- inc...