In a crucial win for the free software movement, a US federal appeals court has ruled that even software developers who give away the programming code for their works can sue for copyright infringement if someone misappropriates that material. The decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC, helps clarify a murky area of the law concerning how much control programmers can exert over their intellectual property once it’s been released for free into the so-called open source
software community
Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And Google, the leading online advertiser, stated that it has begun using Internet tracking technology that enables it to more precisely follow Web-surfing behavior across affiliated sites. The revelations came in response to a bipartisan inquiry of how more than 30 Internet companies might have gathered data to target customers. Some privacy advocates and lawmakers said the disclosures help build a case for an overarching online-privacy law
A federal judge has blocked three MIT students from presenting a paper at the Defcon 16 security conference on hacking the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s CharlieCard
system
The Pirate Bay has been censored
in Italy following an urgent decree from a deputy public prosecutor. Pirate Bay’s IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures
A ring of identity thieves that targeted US retailers used sophisticated and multifaceted attacks to steal more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX, OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble and other companies. The attacks cost retailers and credit card companies tens of millions of dollars. Members of the ID theft conspiracy used wardriving techniques to find holes in wireless networks operated by retail stores. Once inside the networks, the thieves located and stole credit card transaction information stored on the retailers’ networks
Reporters covering the Beijing Olympics who are frustrated by Chinese Internet censorship can use free software tools developed to help Chinese users circumvent these controls, according to a representative of a group that develops such software
Australian consumers have been given a new advocate to represent their interests in the telecommunications sphere. Consumer law and small business experts have joined forces with representatives of indigenous and disabled Australians to form a new peak body aimed at giving the community a stronger platform to raise concerns about telecommunications issues. The federal Government announced the new organisation, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN), today
The Knights Templar are demanding that the Vatican give them back their good name and, possibly, billions in assets into the bargain, 700 years after the order was brutally suppressed by a joint venture between the Pope and the King of France. If the Holy See doesn’t comply, the warrior knights, renowned for liberating the Holy Land, will deploy that most fearsome of weapons: a laborious court case through the creaking Spanish legal system
The FBI removed computer records from the C Burr Artz Library this week. Darrell Batson, director of Frederick County Public Libraries, said two FBI employees came to the downtown Frederick library either Wednesday or Thursday. The agents removed two public computers from the library’s second floor. They told him they were taking the units back to their office in Washington, DC
After witnessing countless corparate attempts to patent common practices or trademark common terms, and seeing the resulting PR fallout, one would think that companies would just stop trying. Dell, however, seems to think that it should be able to trademark the term cloud computing
, a phrase that entered the tech lexicon many years ago to describe software processing that takes place on a distributed network, such as the Internet
Alaska’s Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in US history, was indicted yesterday on seven charges of making false statements about more than $250,000 that corporate executives doled out to overhaul his Anchorage area house
Music fans might soon have their iPods searched by Customs officers at airport checks and face jail if a large amount of pirated music is found on them. The push for the unprecedented searches of travellers’ laptops and MP3 players has been revealed in a leaked discussion paper relating to a treaty being negotiated by the Federal Government
The federal Government will embark on the next step of its internet filtering strategy after initial trials proved successful, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said. Senator Conroy today released the findings of a recently concluded ISP-level internet filtering trial conducted in Tasmania by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in a closed environment
A Florida patent troll called Channel Intelligence is suing everyone from Lemonade to Remember the Milk for infringing on patent 6,917,941, which covers storing a wishlist in a database. Amazon and eBay are absent from the list of targets, even though they very likely store users’ wishlists in a database. With any luck, perhaps one of the defendants will get to use that precedent PJ found the other day from In re Lintner, which said, ‘[c]laims which are broad enough to read on obvious subject matter are unpatentable even though they also read on non-obvious subject matter — via Slashdot
This week, ISPs agreed to work with the BPI to reduce file-sharing in the UK. When someone gets caught
the ISPs will send out a warning, 100% based on music industry provided evidence
. Not even the ISPs know if the claims of the BPI are true, so the evidence is totally unchallenged, a perfect position for the music industry
The Federal Government will abolish certificates that give ministers sweeping powers to keep documents a secret as the first step in reforms to the Freedom of Information law
A discovery leads to questions about whether the odds of people sharing genetic profiles are sometimes higher than portrayed. Calling the finding meaningless, the FBI has sought to block such inquiry
A federal judge has restored endangered species protections for gray wolves in the Northern Rockies, derailing plans by three states to hold public wolf hunts this fall
UK ISPs will be invited to tender for a British government scheme to monitor all internet communications and telecommunications in the country. But Britain’s information commissioner, Richard Thomas, has raised serious concerns about a government plan for a vast new database holding the telephone numbers and email accounts of everyone in the country
eBay scored a major legal victory on Monday when a federal judge absolved it of taking more steps to police fake Tiffany jewelry sold on its web site and held that brand owners are ultimately responsible for protecting their own trademarks. All of Tiffany’s trademark infringement claims against eBay were rejected — a knockout blow to the four-year-old lawsuit that had been closely watched by Internet companies as well as luxury goods makers seeking to stop the sale of counterfeit products online. The ruling is expected to be appealed
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