Tech Law

The recent fall and near collapse of Bear Stearns has been breathtaking. What has caused this once great company to flirt with becoming a penny stock? Will there be stockholders' suits for this remarkable collapse of value? Management of Bear Stearns decided to ride the mortgage-backed securities bo...

A federal court has awarded MySpace nearly $230 million in its suit against Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines -- aka the "Spam King." The judgment -- especially given the size of the award -- represents a decided victory for e-commerce sites in their costly battle against spam. This is th...

A British government agency has complained to the European Commission about the lack of interoperability in some of Microsoft's applications, but regulators are reportedly not opening a new formal inquiry on the complaint. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency filed the compla...

The state of Texas may be the latest to take a bite out of Amazon's bottom line by assessing sales taxes on past purchases by state residents. Texas tax officials are reviewing the taxable status of Amazon purchases after an inquiry from the Dallas Morning News, which asked why the e-tailer appeared...

The long-running debate over net neutrality took another turn Thursday when two lawmakers introduced a bill that would make it a violation of antitrust law for broadband providers to discriminate against different types of content in routing traffic on their networks. John Conyers Jr., a Democrat fr...

The Internet Archive revealed Wednesday that the FBI dropped an effort to secretly obtain information about the online activities of one of the digital library's users. The Archive revealed that it had been served a National Security Letter by the FBI last year about one of its patrons. The San Fran...

A federal judge in Los Angeles has awarded the Motion Picture Association of America $110 million in compensation from Valence Media, operator of the now-defunct file-sharing Web site TorrentSpy. U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ordered Valence Media to pay $30,000 for each copyright infrin...

Amazon.com has filed suit against the state of New York claiming the state's Internet Sales Tax Collection law requiring online companies to pay state sales tax is unconstitutional and violates a 1992 Supreme Court finding. Amazon filed its suit on April 25, claiming that the newly enacted state law...

eBay's unusual legal dispute with executives from Craigslist stems from eBay's decision to bring its Kijiji alternative to the United States. eBay disclosed the details of the spat in a filing in a Delaware court, where it filed the case, known as "eBay Domestic Holdings v. Craig Newmark, et al" las...

A federal judge has established a framework that determines the licensing fee amounts three online services -- Yahoo, AOL and RealNetworks -- should pay to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. The fees could amount to $100 million, according to ASCAP, and will be paid to member...

A federal judge's ruling against the RIAA not only represents a setback for the litigious trade group in one particular lawsuit, but also opens a Pandora's box of technicalities that could mean a few speed bumps ahead for its legal steamroller. In Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA moved for summary judgm...

Comcast has lied about how and why it blocks peer-to-peer Internet traffic, and may be lying in its promise to stop some of its practices by year end, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said during a hearing held by a Senate committee on the future of the Internet. The FCC shoul...

The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that people have an expectation to privacy online and that the authorities can't just demand citizens' IP addresses from their Internet service providers without a grand jury warrant. The ruling was handed down in the case of a woman who was charged with hackin...

Ten years after the Internal Revenue Service first flipped the switch on electronic tax filing, key lawmakers said Monday the time has come to make e-filing free for all taxpayers -- a move that could cost software makers millions in annual revenues. Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Se...

Hard drive maker Seagate Technology is taking solid state drive manufacturer STEC to court over patent infringement. In a suit filed Monday in Northern California's U.S. District Court, Seagate claims STEC has violated four patents that Seagate had registered between 2002 and 2006. The battle is foc...