legal

TVShack.net linking activities legal in Britain, but US seized domain name as student faces possible 10 years in US prison.

Hot social media site Pinterest allows users to "pin" images to their page. But are those images copyright violations?

Apple is threatening to sue Chinese manufacturer Proview for defamation in the ongoing battle over the iPad trademark in that country. But is that a strategic mistake?

Apple's free iBook Author software comes with a catch: sell only through Apple or give your work away.

When they go to court, most companies dump every bit of data they can collect on lawyers, who get paid a lot more than a DBA to filter through it.

Rather than looking into antitrust, the EU should investigate Google's privacy practices, as much to show the rest of IT what its risk is as to reveal anything about Google.

I don't know, but I do know that it's going to make a mess of the technology business and all of us will pay for it.

In some ways, proprietary software contribution agreements are a lot easier to deal with: a developer writes some code, a company pays for it, and the developer's code is owned by the company, for all eternity. But with the wildly different licenses, organizations, and developer motivations that exist in the open source world, it's hard to get standard templates for these agreements created.

Late last month, the folks over at SourceForge.Net found themselves in a bit of a kerfuffle regarding their decision to start enforcing US export laws regarding the transfer of technology to certain individuals, companies, and entities (a.k.a. nations the US has deemed bad news). How they dealt with the community backlash is a good lesson in compromise.