Entertainment Law & Litigation
On Friday, March 13, 2004, the FBI requested the FCC to force ISPs, broadband and dsl providers to rewrite their networks to allow wiretapping by the government. The FBI’s proposal would force cable providers that sell broadband to come under the jurisdiction of 1994’s Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), Read the article here. Caveat: Big Brother is watching!
CNN reports that AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and Earthlink have joined forces and filed 6 federal lawsuits against hundreds of alleged spammers citing the Can-Spam Act. The suits were filed in CA, GA, WA, and VA. The allegations included, but were not limited to, deceptive solicitations and disguising the originating source of the spam. Read the article here.
Last month, a federal trial court in Philadelphia ruled that the Recording Industry Association of America couldn’t sue over 200 alleged “John Doe” defendant file sharers collectively in one suit. Instead, they must sue each defendant individually.
Thomson and Fraunhofer, the companies that license and own the patents to MP3 digital music technology, are creating a new digital rights management add-on for the popular format, which should be available by the end of 2004. Read the article here.
A California appeals court today overturned as unconstitutional a 1999 trade secret injunction against Andrew Bunner that prohibited him from distributing the DeCSS DVD decryption computer code, because the court found there was no evidence that the Content Scrambling System (CSS) encryption technology used in DVD movie disks was still a trade secret by the time that Bunner posted DeCSS code on his website. The Court held that the injunction therefore violated Bunner’s constitutional free-speech Continue reading DVD DeCSS Code Can Be Published