Tech Law

Does your business bear legal responsibility to police the infringement of one of your organization's most valuable assets, the company brand, on widely used Internet auction sites like eBay? That all depends on where the electronic commerce is being conducted, based on recently issued, conflicting ...

U.S. television programming is moving toward on-demand status, judging from a federal appeals court ruling Monday in favor of Cablevision's proposed network-centric digital video recorder. Concluding a two-year legal battle, U.S. Circuit Court Judge John M. Walker Jr. found that Cablevision's plans ...

Dell has successfully navigated through a considerable stretch of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office maze in its quest for ownership of the ubiquitous technology industry term "cloud computing." On March 23, 2007, Dell filed an Intent to Use application with the PTO; its request was published and ...

I was once in the middle of an anchor dispute. Consultant-led mediation helped, but the best advice came from an older, wiser anchor who told me to keep smiling, be patient and wait for my coanchor to implode. Of course, all this was before the rise of computer hacking, spyware and keylogging device...

Hope springs anew for the more than 500,000 "Scrabulous" fans mourning the demise of their beloved Facebook game. Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla have launched a "new" word game, "Wordscraper." The new game, which bears a striking resemblance to its banned predecessor, made its Facebook debut as early as...

Beginning on Friday, Reuters can no longer use a critical piece of technology in its widely used Reuters Messaging Network, a court ruled Wednesday. Instead, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York entered judgment in favor of FaceTime Communications, owner of the inst...

Sprint Nextel sustained a harsh legal blow this week that could have wide-ranging effects across the entire mobile telephone industry. A judge in California ruled that it is illegal for Sprint to charge so-called early termination fees when customers discontinue their wireless phone service before t...

Facebookers hoping to get in on a game of Scrabulous on Tuesday were left disappointed. Instead of linking to the game, designed by brothers Rajat and Jayant Argarwalla for play on the Facebook social networking platform, players found the following message: "Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Cana...

Reports continue to circulate that the FCC has enough votes to rule that Comcast illegally blocked traffic between peer-to-peer Internet applications and that the government will soon set down guidelines for the Internet service provider that could serve as a precedent regarding the hotly debated to...

Hasbro, maker of the word game Scrabble, has issued the ultimate double challenge to social network Facebook and its wildly popular Scrabble-like application Scrabulous: a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. The suit, filed Thursday in a New York district court, claims the application violates ...

Proponents of the beleaguered Child Online Protection Act suffered yet another blow Tuesday when a federal appeals court deemed the law unconstitutional once again. The 1998 law, known as "COPA," aims to keep children from viewing pornographic materials on the Internet by making it a crime for comme...

Cell phone trafficking operations siphon millions of dollars from the wireless industry and its customers every year. Until recently, little could be done to fight back, but a vigorous counter-attack that has yielded several victories in federal courts across the country is beginning to turn the tid...

Intel investors received a double whammy of both good and possibly bad news regarding the world's largest chipmaker on Tuesday. Intel's quarterly profits topped analyst estimates by 3 cents. However, the company's guidance for the upcoming quarter was less than what many in the market had been expec...

Online poker is becoming more and more popular in Germany. As a result, the country's strict legal restrictions on gambling are under pressure, and Germany may soon have to open its protected markets to private online poker providers. Currently, private online poker operations violate the new German...

Viacom and Google have agreed to keep the personal information of YouTube users private, even as Viacom gears up for the next stage of litigation in its copyright infringement lawsuit against Google. Google will provide user data to Viacom, but redact information that can be used to make personal i...