Remember the Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal of last year? Private investigators hired by HP obtained phone records of journalists and its own board members by pretending to be the individuals themselves. The scandal was the catalyst for a congressional investigation, and some California lawmakers decided consumers needed more protection from...

Does the increased use of social networking sites by children lead to increased risk? Concern about online predators and pornography has led some politicians and law enforcement officials to call for unreasonable restrictions on public access to these sites.
But is the perception of increased risk accurate? How much...

Last week, a California Superior Court judge ruled that Kaleidescape did not violate its contract with the DVD DRM licensing authority by distributing a home media server that rips and plays DVDs. This is an important victory for consumers, but it's also a sad reminder of how your...

The Utah legislature has quietly passed a dangerous law allowing trademark owners to prevent their marks from being used as keywords to generate comparative ads. If this law takes effect, a company like Chevrolet couldn't purchase "sponsored link" space on the Google results page when a user types "Toyota" as...

In a little-noticed report entitled Filesharing Programs and "Technological Features to Induce Users to Share," the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has decided to attack several leading P2P software applications for making user interface decisions that allegedly "dupe" users into sharing files unintentionally. In hyperbole that is all...

The latest development in the RIAA's long-running filesharing shakedown campaign--demanding colleges and universities forward "pre-litigation" settlement offers to their students--has placed academic institutions in an untenable position. If they don't pass on the letters or even make them available to students, they are arguably harming those students by depriving them...