Entertainment industry executives have floated all sorts of ideas to tackle piracy at the Internet service provider level. Some Hollywood suits have proposed that ISPs filter their networks for pirated content, while others have asked Congress to order colleges to consider filters.

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The French equivalent of the RIAA is pressuring the government to move forward with this scheme before the summer recess. But that timetable looks extremely unlikely, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation reports.

Three film studios have sued four Ohio residents to stop them from illegally sharing movies online, part of a string of similar lawsuits filed around the country in recent years.

The Ohio residents have distributed the films "Hitch," "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "Good Night and Good Luck," among others, according to the lawsuits filed Thursday in U.S. District Court by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. and two subsidiaries of Sony Pictures -- Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. and Screen Gems Inc.

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The movie studios have been somewhat more creative in their approach to the problem, said Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit and online free-speech advocate.

But the film industry's lawsuits are still a big club to use against individuals and aren't all that successful in addressing the overall problem, McSherry said.

"It's thousands of people who are essentially being terrorized and intimidated," she said. "Paying lawyers a lot of money to sue your potential customers is a really bad approach to growing your business."

The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the order public, civil liberties groups announced Wednesday morning.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive's lawyers, fought the NSL, challenging its constitutionality in a December 14 complaint to a federal court in San Francisco. The FBI agreed on April 21 to withdraw the letter and unseal the court case, making some of the documents available to the public.

The FBI has backed down on a secret request for information about a user of the Internet Archive digital library, thanks to a legal challenge from two prominent advocacy groups.

The case, which was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the archive, dates to last year but only became public on Wednesday. That's because the type of request involved, known as a national security letter (NSL), is accompanied by a gag order that forbids the recipient from disclosing its existence or discussing it with anyone except his attorneys, who are also gagged. As a result of a settlement, the FBI agreed to withdraw the national security letter and to lift the gag order.

Wikipedia has been caught up in a defamation case after a New Jersey literary agent received an unflattering entry in the online encyclopaedia.

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Wikipedia is being aided in the case by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and both groups filed a motion on 1 May asking for the suit to be dismissed.

"Wikipedia continues to be a tremendous resource for people around the globe, " said EFF senior staff attorney Matt Zimmerman.

"Without strong liability protection, it would be difficult for Wikipedia to continue to provide a platform for user-created content."

A broad coalition of technology groups today told a federal appeals court to toss out a lawsuit that adware maker Zango is continuing to pursue against computer security vendor Kaspersky Lab, arguing that to do otherwise would harm consumers and the future of the security software market.

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In a "friend of the court" brief filed with the appeals court today, a diverse collection of technology groups rallied behind Kaspersky in support of preserving the lower court ruling. Signatories to the brief include the Business Software Alliance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (it's not often the BSA and EFF see eye-to-eye on tech issues), McAfee, Sunbelt Software and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT).

The call came in to police just after midnight April 16.

Hours before, a distraught young man had phoned his mother, hinting he wanted to kill himself. When he didn't meet her as planned, she telephoned Seattle police and reported her son missing.

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"What you'd want is those rules to be in place, and, as far as we know, they are not," said Rebecca Jechke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the law firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton Thursday filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought against the operator of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, arguing that federal law immunizes it against suits over statements made by its users.

Literary agent Barbara Bauer filed a complaint in New Jersey Superior Court in January against Wikipedia posters as well as the site itself, claiming in part that the Wikimedia Foundation was liable for statements identifying her as one the "dumbest of the twenty worst" agents and that she had "no documented sales at all." In court papers filed Thursday, Wikimedia argues that under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, operators of "interactive computer services" such as Wikipedia cannot be held liable for users' comments. In addition, Wikimedia argues that the statements are protected speech under the First Amendment and New Jersey law.

A U.S. District Court Judge has reversed his own ruling in a legal battle between the RIAA and a couple it had sued for copyright infringement in 2006. The RIAA sued Pamela and Jeffery Howell over their use of the Kazaa file sharing software, which allowed copyrighted songs to be made available for sharing online. According to CNet, Jeffery Howell said he had ripped songs from his own CDs, but not placed the tracks in the shared folder, nor had he downloaded them using Kazaa. Howell also argued that the computer was technically sharing the songs, not him.

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Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney Fred von Lohmann described the order as the "most decisive rejection yet of the recording industry's 'making available' theory of infringement," according to CNet.

Pennsylvania's chief liquor regulator says a plan to offer wine in up to 100 free-standing kiosks in grocery stores is part of the state's ongoing attempt to modernize the way it sells alcohol.

But public health advocates said Tuesday they're concerned about whether the state would be able to keep the wine out of the hands of underage drinkers.

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"One of the things to keep in mind: Do you really want to hand over more information to the government? And who else would be able to have access to it? How will they secure it?" asked Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco.

"Would you really want a record of how often you buy alcohol?" she asked.