Tech Law

Comcast's federal circuit court victory over the Federal Communications Commission this week appears to have thrown a wide range of federal-level Internet plans into question. Only three weeks ago, the FCC announced its National Broadband Plan, with ambitious initiatives aimed at making high-speed ...

Google has become the target of another lawsuit alleging privacy violations in connection with the February rollout of Buzz, its social networking application. The suit, Feldman v. Google, was filed in a federal court in San Jose, Calif., by New York resident Barry Feldman, who is seeking class acti...

Photographers and illustrators claim that they are not being fairly compensated by Google. Seeking what the visual artists assert is their fair share, James J. McGuire, lead counsel for the group, filed a class action copyright infringement suit against Google Wednesday morning in the U.S. District ...

Cloud computing and SaaS are on the rise in a big way, but for some companies, there's an issue that is starting to come up in a lot of conversations with their service providers: the geographical location of their data. While it may not seem a big deal to some, conflicts with national privacy laws ...

Egged on by the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, the Federal Trade Commission may be considering an effort to block Google's $750 million purchase of mobile advertising firm AdMob. The FTC reportedly is assembling a team of attorneys to h...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has issued a ruling that could spell the end of Net neutrality -- or merely redefine the battle terms a little. It's a matter of perspective. The court ruled that the FCC did not prove it had the authority to order Comcast to change it network m...

In a startling development, New York is now taking the position that sales of online services are subject to sales tax -- believe it or not -- as sales of canned software. In other words, the Department is alleging that there is no meaningful difference between purchasing an online service and, for ...

Google, AOL, AT&T, the ACLU, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and other members of a newly formed coalition called "Digital Due Process" are proposing that the federal government update laws on government access to email and private files stored by third-party service providers in the cloud -- or any o...

Australia's proposed Internet filtering plan has already drawn criticism from censorship foes around the globe, and the U.S. Department of State recently weighed in with its own concerns. The plan would require that Australian ISPs filter out a range of content, including child sexual abuse, bestial...

U.S. District Judge Patti Saris sentenced computer hacker Albert Gonzalez to 20 years in prison for his role in stealing 40 million debit and credit card numbers that resulted in an economic loss of $200 million, according to the U.S. government's best estimate. The sentence closes what was the larg...

A new bill introduced in the Senate on Tuesday aims to put the United States in a leading role in the global fight against cybercrime. Dubbed the "International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act," the bipartisan legislation was introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Sen. Orrin Hat...

Three of the biggest names in the Internet industry are founding members of the Global Network Initiative, a consortium of companies, non-profits and academic groups formed in October 2008 to promote human rights and privacy around the world. However, now one of those companies, Google, finds itself...

Google's relationship with the Chinese government officially entered the brinksmanship phase this week with the announcement from the company that it is ending its Communist-mandated censorship of search results and directing queries to its unfiltered Hong Kong-based service. The Great Firewall imme...

Google is trumpeting victory in a European court ruling over its practice of selling trademarks to competing firms for use in the search giant's paid results program. However, the EU court also set a new standard for national courts that could ultimately reshape how the company's $23 billion adverti...

The USPTO has finally approved Amazon's 1-Click Patent, which has been the subject of much criticism and debate since it was originally filed back in 1997. Many critics cite concerns with the breadth of the patent protection applied for and subsequently approved. Others express concerns over the s...