Fans of the Sci Fi channel's "reimagined" version of Battlestar Galactica (BSG) all know that the only reason the human warship Galactica survived the initial attack by the Cylons was that it was an old ship using old technology. The Cylon attack crippled the modern systems of the rest of...

The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported that the Authors Guild is up in arms over a feature of the new Amazon Kindle 2 that reads e-books aloud using a text-to-speech algorithm. According to Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken, "They don't have the right to read a book...

We posted our initial thoughts about the proposed Google Book Search settlement when it was announced in October 2008. Since that time, the official notice to members of the class has been approved by the court (available online here). This is still probably the best introduction to the...

Tim Lee over at Ars Technica has an update on latest chapter in the MDY v. Blizzard case, which pits the maker of World of Warcraft against the maker of Glider, software that lets your computer play WoW on auto-pilot for you. We reported on an earlier...

According to briefs filed last month by the RIAA and Universal Music Group, it's illegal to sell, give away, or even throw out "promo CDs." Of course, this is exactly the argument that UMG made, and lost, in court last year. Despite that loss, and despite...

With trial looming, GateHouse Media and the New York Times over the weekend settled their dispute over "hyper-local" news aggregation sites on the NYT-owned Boston.com website.
The parties' joint press release pointed interested parties to the binding letter agreement [PDF] the parties signed over the weekend. The...

The Kentucky Court of Appeals today granted petitions by the Interactive Gaming Council (IGC) Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association, Inc. (iMEGA) to overturn an earlier trial court ruling authorizing the seizure of domain names owned by operators of overseas gambling websites. While challenged on several additional fronts...

The FISA Court of Review (FISCR) today released a public version of an opinion concerning warrantless wiretapping. An unnamed telecommunications carrier stood up for its customers' privacy by fighting the case through an initial decision by a FISA court and the appeal to the FISCR. The Court approved the...

Over the holidays, video hosting site Veoh won another victory under the DMCA safe harbors, this time against Universal Music Group (UMG). The ruling should put to rest the argument that transcoding and other activities necessary for making content accessible on the web are not...

Two months ago, in In re Bilski, the Federal Circuit rejected the notion that anything that produces a "useful, concrete, and tangible result" is potentially patentable. Instead, to be patent-eligible, an idea must be "tied to a particular machine or apparatus," or it must "transform a particular article into...