She isn’t accused of homicide, exactly, but a woman in Japan could spend five years in jail on charges related to “murdering” her virtual husband in revenge for a virtual divorce.
Police in Japan suspect that a 43-year-old woman grew enraged after her online husband “divorced” her in the interactive Maple Story game — so much so that she virtually eliminated him.
The woman, Mayumi Tomari, has been arrested by the police on suspicion of illegally using the man’s logon and password to steal his ID in the game and delete his character, according to an account in the Daily Yomiuri Online.
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The vote’s been tallied, and the European Union’s new Safer Internet program turned out to be roughly as controversial as claiming that water’s wet. While almost three percent of members abstained, a full 96 percent of the European Parliament agreed to spend 55 million to protect children online.
The 55 million (or $70.5 million) would be doled out between 2009 and 2013. Part of it would go towards awareness initiatives and research. Labels proclaiming some sites safe for children would also be established, and contact points and hotlines for reporting illegal and objectionable content are in the works.
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eBay has filed suit against Digital Point Solutions, best known as the owner of one of the more popular web site owner communities, and others over an alleged cookie stuffing scheme.
According to the filing lodged in the Northern California District Court, Shawn Hogan and Digital Point Solutions, Todd Dunning and Kessler’s Flying Circus, and Brian Dunning and Thunderwood Holdings defrauded eBay in a “cookie stuffing” scheme that made it appear that their companies should be paid commissions on eBay affiliate sales.
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In August, Italian courts ordered that local ISPs block popular BitTorrent destination The Pirate Bay, but the decision was later overturned in appeal. This week, we found out why the Court of Bergamo ruled as it did.
Italy’s recent attempt to block BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay was deemed indefensible under an EU regulation.
At the end of September, an Italian tribunal decided that ISPs were not allowed to block the Pirate Bay. This week, details of that decision were made public. According to those documents, it is not within the power of the Italian courts to unconditionally block a foreign site on the grounds of copyright infringement.
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In a costly loss in US District Court in Alexandria yesterday, a jury found all of Verizon’s claims that Cox Communications infringed upon its VoIP-related patents to be without basis, and even invalidated two of eight patent claims. Back in January, Verizon filed a patent infringement suit against a Virginia division of Cox Communications, which was establishing VoIP service in that state. It was a boilerplate case that asserted its claims to eight US patents in the field of Internet-related voice telephony. Those patents were mostly acquired by Verizon on account of mergers and acquisitions, having been originally issued to such one-time giants as MCI and Bell Atlantic. Two such patents issued to Bell Atlantic in 1997 were both for an “enhanced name translation server.” Imagine a DNS server that was capable of being directed arbitrarily to resolve a domain name resolution request with an alternate IP address. Now imagine if that alternative could be a telephone number, or something which linked to the public service telephone network at that number. That’s the basis of these two patent claims. Yesterday, with a series of checkmarks on a court tally, the jury declared those two Verizon claims invalid. This in a case in which Verizon was the plaintiff. A Verizon spokesperson’s statement yesterday did not specifically indicate whether it would appeal the jury’s verdict, though it did reiterate the company’s belief that its patents were infringed. The jury’s decision does not nullify those patents, though the invalidation of those two claims could be strikes against Verizon should Cox find itself defending against an appeal in a higher court.
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Litigants trying to get data on what the video site’s users were watching have backed off somewhat, although YouTube will still have to share some data with Viacom.
Plaintiffs Viacom and a class-action group led by the Football Association of England agreed to accept a watered-down version of YouTube’s viewer logs. That version will not include the IP addresses nor the YouTube usernames of the viewers.
Earlier this month, a judge ordered Google to turn over this information to Viacom. The media conglomerate had specifically requested information that would have also tied the viewer data to a specific YouTube user.
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Yesterday, eBay secured an important legal victory after New York District Judge Richard Sullivan ruled the online auction service actually did do enough to thwart the sale of counterfeit jewelry.
The battle between Tiffany and eBay started four years ago in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, and has ended with a decision stating it’s the responsibility of manufacturers to police counterfeit goods sold through eBay.
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eBay has won a major legal victory today, after a federal judge ruled that Tiffany was not able to prove the online auction company was responsible for the sale of counterfeit Tiffany jewelry on its Web site.
The 2004 lawsuit brought by Tiffany in U.S. District Court in New York and the ruling in eBay’s favor could influence how business is done online.
Tiffany claimed that eBay ignored the sale of fake Tiffany silver jewelry on its site. eBay said the jeweler did not participate in eBay programs that help brand owners prevent fraud.
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According to a decision by the Frankfurt Court of Appeal the victims of WiFi theft can’t be held responsible for the thieves’ copyright infringement. The same court that previously ruled parents can’t be held responsible for the flle sharing activities of their children overturned a lower court’s decision, and potentially dealt a blow to the campaign being waged by a UK lawfirm against several hundred people for alleged copyright infringement.
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The IFPI and Italy’s Guardia di Finanza have announced the shutdown of the alleged file-sharing forum Downrevolution.net for thousands of instances of copyright infringement.
In connection with the site, four people have been arrested and each will face a “criminal investigation.”
Reports claim that only one of the men arrested was over the age of 18 meaning the rest are minors. There was no word on whether they will prosecuted as minors however. 17 computers, three external hard drives, and hundreds of counterfeit CDs and DVDs were also seized from a house in Sesto San Giovanni.
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