Tech Law

Talk about your anti-climatic endings. Thirteen years after the Sturm und Drang that was the government prosecution of Microsoft on antitrust grounds, the mammoth, multi-million dollar case has ended with a straightforward, run-of-the-mill legal proceeding. The case will end on May 12 without any fu...

Last year, as part of a broad enforcement campaign, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began seizing the domain names of websites involved in copyright infringement and the sale of counterfeit goods. ICE, a division of DHS, carried out the first phase of Operation In Our Sites in June 2010 whe...

In the days since researchers Peter Warden and Alasdair Allan published the unsettling discovery that Apple's iOS could track users' movements, timestamp them, and then send the information to Apple, the following has occurred: 1) Google has been outed as well, spurred on by a not-so-subtle tip prov...

In the competitive federal information technology market, Google thought it was a good idea to challenge the U.S. Interior Department on a potentially rich procurement for hosted messaging services. Google claimed that Interior failed to observe government contracting policies by focusing on Microso...

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against the principals and others associated with three of the largest Internet poker sites, Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker. The 11 named defendants were charged with fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling offense...

Dating website Match.com has announced it will shortly begin checking existing and new members against public sex offender registries. The move follows on the heels of a lawsuit filed by a woman who says she was sexually assaulted by a sex offender -- a man she met through Match.com. The move is a d...

Senators John Kerry, D-Mass., and John McCain, R-Ariz., introduced an Internet privacy bill on Tuesday that proposes new rules about how websites can collect information about users. The measures would help protect Internet users by requiring sites to notify customers when their data is being collec...

Courts and regulators have recently made life more complicated for Google, impacting millions of Google users worldwide. Notwithstanding Google's $29 billion revenue performance in 2010, new challenges continue to plague the company. As you may know, Google planned to digitize millions of books. In ...

More legal trouble could be in the cards for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Old pal Paul Ceglia claims he's entitled to half the company in exchange for $1,000 funding he provided in 2003. Ceglia sued Zuckerberg last July, and in the weeks following the suit he presented a contract bearing Zuckerberg...

Sony Entertainment has reached a settlement with George Hotz, aka "GeoHot," the hacker who jailbroke Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console. The settlement was reached on March 31, according to a Sony blog post. The terms were not fully disclosed, but Hotz has apparently agreed to a permanent injunctio...

Time Warner Cable and Viacom are countersuing each other over whether Time Warner Cable has the right to live stream Viacom content to its Apple iPad app, which it released in March. In short, Time Warner Cable says the rights it already obtained from Viacom entitle it to distribute the content in t...

There are several investors positioning themselves to snap up Blockbuster at its bankruptcy auction, scheduled for Monday. They are lining up in competition against Cobalt Video, a venture formed by some of Blockbuster's bondholders, which made an opening bid, or stalking horse offer, of $290 millio...

Microsoft is filing a formal antitrust complaint with the European Commission as part of the commission's investigation into possible Google violations of European competition law. Google holds about 95 percent of the European search market. The complaint involves Google restraining competition by...

Amazon surprised the music world this week with the rollout of several products that will allow consumers to store and access their digital music in the cloud. Perhaps no one was more surprised, though, than the music studios, who appeared to have learned the details of the offering shortly before t...

The Obama administration's program to more efficiently utilize information technology has worked -- but not well enough to get a passing grade from the U.S. Congress. Lawmakers are ratcheting up the pressure on federal agencies to improve their IT resource management -- including the way they procur...