Tech Law

In the case of Tiffany vs. eBay, a U.S. district judge has presented the e-commerce giant with the best gift it could get in this litigious, digital age: a victory in a four-year-old trademark protection lawsuit. Judge Richard Sullivan of New York found that eBay's process of vetting suspected count...

Two more Internet service providers have joined New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's crusade to block access to online child pornography at a key distribution source. AOL and AT&T have joined ISPs Verizon, Sprint Nextel and Time Warner Cable in this agreement, in which they cut off ser...

President George Bush has signed into law a measure that overhauls wiretapping rules and grants immunity to telecom companies that cooperated with a secret warrantless wiretap program. The administration established the spying operation after Sept. 11 to gain greater flexibility in eavesdropping on ...

The Internet is the greatest technical development of the 20th century, and its open competition model has been the envy of other market sectors. Internet advances are being crushed by monopolistic carriers who are more concerned with censoring content than delivering services to customers. Those di...

A new ruling in Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google has privacy advocates fretting that the case may further erode privacy online, even if it's eventually settled. Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for Southern New York ruled that Google must provide Viacom with information from ...

Microsoft may now be looking at a team-based approach to buying Yahoo. The company has talked with other media corporations about partnering up to split Yahoo's assets, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, which cited sources close to the discussions. Microsoft could buy Yahoo's search ...

Following its failed effort to curb youngsters' access to video games with "Mature" or "Adults Only" ratings by fining kids for obtaining them, the state of Minnesota on Monday was the one paying. The state paid the Entertainment Software Association $65,000, reimbursing the organization for attorne...

Since the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley on July 30, 2002, many executives and board members have developed an almost palpable degree of anxiety when it comes to corporate governance and board service. In fact, some friends of mine who have been asked to serve on boards of publicly held companies have ...

Though the ink has hardly dried on the ad partnership deal between Google and Yahoo, Congress is already setting its investigative machinery in motion to determine whether the tie-up might violate antitrust or privacy laws. The U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection had a...

Lawmakers have crafted a compromise on a bill that would extend controversial eavesdropping legislation and add provisions meant to protect telecommunications companies from private lawsuits, including several already under way. Ending months of negotiations, the House of Representatives on Friday p...

A ruling by a three-judge panel in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has established new privacy rights for employees who use employer-issued cell phones, pagers and computers to send personal text messages. The judges upheld the verdict in Quon v. Arch Wireless, which determined that if an ...

Two Orange County, Calif., teens have been charged with breaking into their school late at night and using stolen log-ins to hack into its computer system and change their grades. Omar Khan, 18, a student at Tesoro High School in Rancho Santa Margarita, now faces 34 felony counts of altering a publi...

A federal judge has ruled that an administrative office within the Executive Office of the President is not subject to the 41-year-old Freedom of Information Act. The decision is the latest hurdle blocking a many-fronted effort to determine how an alleged 10 million White House e-mails apparently di...

Seeking to protect its own business model, The Associated Press is hoping to clarify what constitutes fair use of the content is publishes online, with plans to lay out guidelines for bloggers on how much content they can quote. The AP, which bills itself as the world's largest and oldest news-gathe...

Sky-high cancellation fees for cell phone contracts could soon be a thing of the past, but getting there is proving to be difficult. The Federal Communications Commission has put forward a plan to regulate carriers' ability to charge you for ending your agreement early -- but not everyone in the ind...