by Wendy Davis on May 16, 5:27 PM
File-sharer Joel Tenenbaum is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider his argument that a six-figure judgment for sharing 30 tracks on Kazaa is unconstitutional.
by Wendy Davis on May 15, 5:45 PM
Car company General Motors will pull its $10 million ad campaign from Facebook, The Wall Street Journal reported this afternoon. The Journal says that GM executives felt that the display "had little impact on consumers." The company will continue to use Facebook for marketing, but without paying for ads.
by Wendy Davis on May 14, 5:14 PM
With its initial public offering looming, Facebook is again floating a new privacy policy. The company's latest round of revisions were apparently prompted by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner's Office, which Facebook says encouraged it "to be even more detailed about how we use information."
by Wendy Davis on May 11, 5:20 PM
The digital locker service MP3tunes won a major victory in court last August, when a federal judge in New York ruled that the company can rely on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions if users upload pirated music. Those safe harbors protect companies from liability for users' uploads, provided the companies remove pirated material upon request.
by Wendy Davis on May 10, 6:09 PM
After nearly eight years of litigation, porn company Perfect 10 has withdrawn its copyright infringement lawsuit against Google. Perfect 10 said in court papers that the withdrawal was with prejudice, meaning that it can't bring the same charges later.
by Wendy Davis on May 9, 6:12 PM
Search engines have a free-speech right to display whichever results they choose, in whichever order they choose, constitutional law scholar Eugene Volokh argues in a paper commissioned by Google and submitted to the Federal Trade Commission. Volokh argues that Google has the same free-speech rights as newspapers, encyclopedias or other publishers in deciding what content to feature -- even if the decisions are seen as unfair or harmful to other businesses.
by Wendy Davis on May 8, 6:54 PM
Occupy Wall Street protester Matthew Harris was among hundreds of people who were arrested last October following a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge. Harris was charged with disorderly conduct for allegedly walking in the street, as opposed to the sidewalk.The Manhattan District Attorney believes that Harris's former Twitter account,will help the government to refute the claim that the police themselves were responsible for Harris' move to the roadway. The MDA's office subpoenaed Twitter for all of Harris' messages between Sept. 15 and Dec. 31. Today, the microblogging company filed a motion seeking to quash the subpoena.
by Wendy Davis on May 7, 6:59 PM
Add Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) to the growing list of people questioning Comcast. The senator sent a letter today to the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice calling for an investigation of the cable giant. The move was sparked by Comcast's recent announcement that it will allow Xfinity subscribers to stream shows to an Xbox without counting that data toward home broadband users' 250 GB-a-month limit.
by Wendy Davis on May 4, 5:06 PM
Back in 2008, when the Federal Communications Commission voted to make white spaces available for mobile broadband, TV broadcasters were among the biggest naysayers. The National Association of Broadcasters went so far as to sue the FCC in hopes of stopping the white-spaces plan. This week, however, the organization filed a motion seeking to withdraw its lawsuit.
by Wendy Davis on May 3, 6:08 PM
The long-running lawsuit against Google about its book scanning project returned to federal district court in New York this morning, where Google argued that the Authors Guild shouldn't be allowed to pursue its seven-year-old copyright infringement case.