Tech Law

The net neutrality debate has officially taken a left turn into weirdness, following weekend revelations that AT&T has asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the Google Voice application as a potential violation of open communications policies. This would be the same AT&T...

The net neutrality debate has officially taken a left turn into weirdness, following weekend revelations that AT&T has asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the Google Voice application as a potential violation of open communications policies. This would be the same AT&T...

Oftentimes, 100 percent of the value of a startup company may be based on the company's intellectual property. If a company's value is based upon its technology or its branding, it is vital that the startup entrepreneur take the appropriate steps to protect its intellectual property. Beyond the obv...

On March 21, 2006, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet: "Just setting up my twittr." A mere three years later, in February 2009, Twitter had approximately 4 million visitors. At that point, Twitter set an audacious goal of one day reaching 1 billion users and becoming "the pulse ...

A day after Google announced it had bought itself some digital help in its Google Books project by way of reCAPTCHA, reports surfaced of new governmental objections to a settlement the company reached last year with publishers and author groups. The attorneys general of five states have filed a clas...

The Department of Justice has asked Yahoo and Microsoft to supply it with more information about its proposed search advertising tie-up that the duo announced earlier this summer. Both companies have said they are cooperating with the inquiry. Indeed, they all but predicted this would happen when th...

September is shaping up to be a crucial time for the future of Google's much-vaunted digital library. The month has already seen a flood of briefs on a proposed settlement in the lawsuit filed by authors and publishers over Google's effort to digitize the world's books. Next week, the U.S. Justice D...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has temporarily stayed an injunction against the sale of Microsoft Word that had been set to go into effect next month. Microsoft will be able to continue selling copies of its ubiquitous word processing software -- at least until the appeal of the o...

The European Commission on Thursday expanded its investigation into Oracle's plans to purchase Sun Microsystems. The EC wants to study the potential antitrust issues arising from proprietary database vendor Oracle's takeover of Sun's open source MySQL database application. It will issue its ruling o...

Congress should enact strict controls on how online advertisers can monitor and track consumers' behavior, according to 10 privacy groups that formed a coalition to lobby for the cause. The group has sent letters to six members of the U.S. House of Representatives describing the extent to which pers...

Personalized Internet radio stations got a boost Friday when a federal appeals court ruled that Yahoo's LAUNCHcast music service was not interactive enough to be forced to pay hundreds of millions of US dollars in licensing fees. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said LAUNCHcast did...

A coalition of firms that oppose a settlement reached last year between Google and some representatives of the publishing industry over its Google Books project is growing. New members now reportedly include a troika of Web giants: Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. The coalition, called the "Open Book Al...

Microsoft has asked an appeals court to stay an injunction that Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas issued against the sale of Microsoft Word. The judge made the ruling after a jury found that Microsoft had infringed on a patent held by Toronto-based i4i. It is set to go...

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy summed up the American policy on the disclosure of corporate and personal information when he said, "You already have zero privacy -- get over it." Corporate America has widely accepted the erosion of data privacy and the fact that electronic data residing within a...

It is surprising -- albeit perhaps inevitable -- that the Obama Administration, which so ably navigated the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies during its presidential campaign, has stumbled using those same tools now that it is in office. The White House has received a large number of complaints from...