Tech Law

There's big money in counterfeiting name-brand goods. Sales of knockoff products over the Internet climbed to nearly $120 billion in 2007, up from $84 billion the previous year, estimated MarkMonitor, an online protection firm that works with eBay and other online auction houses to shut counterfeite...

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear Dish Network's appeal of a decision that found EchoStar had infringed TiVo's patent for its Time Warp software, which allows users to record television programs while watching a different channel, and also to skip over commercials. The appellate court ruli...

Of all the protests mounted against the pending ad partnership between Google and Yahoo, the one lodged by Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., is bound to be among the most worrisome. Kohl, who oversees the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, has asked the Justice Department to continue to monitor the competitive la...

Traditionally, requests for permanent injunctions were treated similarly in both patent and trademark infringement cases, generally being granted almost automatically any time a patent or trademark owner proved infringement. Recent cases, however, have called this parity into question. As reported i...

The Motion Picture Association of America has filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court of Los Angeles seeking a restraining order against RealNetworks. RealDVD, which became available on Tuesday, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the MPAA maintains. It is hardly surprising that the ...

Microsoft has teamed with Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna to try and stamp out so-called scareware. The AG and Microsoft have filed lawsuits against James Reed McCreary IV of The Woodlands, Texas. The suit names him as the marketer of an application called "Registry Cleaner XP." Also ...

Several Silicon Valley Congress members have urged the U.S. Department of Justice not to interfere in the pending online advertising deal between search engine giants Google and Yahoo. Mountain View, Calif.-based Google and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo are situated in the heart of Silicon Valley. T...

Besides working overtime to crank out the $700 billion financial market rescue plan -- to little avail as it turned out -- the House of Representatives on Sunday also passed a piece of legislation that could rack up significantly more penalties for copyright violation. The Prioritizing Resources and...

The weekend media spotlight was on the heated Congressional negotiations that produced a financial bailout bill, which promptly went nowhere. But hidden somewhere in the static of dealmaking, rhetoric and counteroffers was a strong signal of support for Internet radio. The Webcaster Settlement Act o...

Three major Internet service providers have promised Congress that they do not monitor their customers' activities online. However, in an argument worthy of the political venue in which it was made, executives from these companies went on to equivocate about what they were actually doing and whether...

Silicon Valley semiconductor company Transmeta has put itself up for sale. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip designer hired investment bank Piper Jaffray in early 2008 to assist it in exploring options. The Transmeta board ultimately decided a sale of the company was the best strategy. Piper Jaffra...

She wasn't the first person to be sued by the music industry for illegally sharing digital music files, but Jammie Thomas was the first to go to court in the ongoing battle over copyrights, consumers and charges of piracy. The 30-year-old single mother from Minnesota lost the first round last Octobe...

A battle is brewing over a secretive intellectual property agreement being negotiated by the U.S. and several other nations. Leaked documents indicate the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement would allow multiple countries to enforce each others' intellectual property laws. That, some fear, could pos...

A new report from the Government Accountability Office -- relating the findings of investigators who went under cover to see how well the CRT disposal rule was followed and enforced -- concludes that the U.S. EPA is abdicating its responsibility for regulating e-waste. "Companies easily circumvent t...

Jeremy Jaynes -- said to be one of the world's most prolific spammers -- had his nine-year jail sentence vacated after the Virginia state Supreme Court ruled that the law under which he was prosecuted violated the First Amendment. It did not adequately differentiate between commercial and noncommerc...