Institute for Information Law & Policy

THE Dish Network and three television networks filed opposing lawsuits on Thursday over Auto Hop, a feature that allows Dish subscribers to automatically skip all the advertising during most prime-time shows.

The owners of the CBS, Fox and NBC networks accused Dish of copyright infringement in connection with the feature, which had been technically feasible for more than a decade but had not been offered to consumers by a major distributor until now.

A group of computer coders who claim to be part of the hacktivist group Anoymous are planning to create a ‘social music platform’ that will stream music from legitimate and illegitimate third-party sources, according to reports.

MOSCOW — I was discussing a newly submitted article with a colleague at the magazine we edit when another editor ran into the room shouting, “Did you see? They didn’t let Verbitsky out of the country because someone has trademarked his  beard.” Mikhail Verbitsky, a mathematician, is a popular blogger.

“April Fool’s?” I asked.

We checked our various devices. It was April 11.

Google is being sued for copyright infringement in connection with its Google Music service launched late last year. But this isn’t a run-of-the-mill case. It involves photographs of John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, the involvement of artist Thierry “Mr. Brainwash” Guetta and a backdrop used to announce Google’s new music service.

The controversy over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act intensified on Tuesday when a White House spokeswoman warned Congress not to pass “cybersecurity” legislation without “robust safeguards to preserve the privacy and civil liberties of our citizens.”

Apple Corps, Ltd., the company set up by the members of The Beatles, has succeeded in preventing a Dutch manufacturer from selling a “Beatle” wheelchair.

On Thursday, the European Union’s Court of Justice ruled in a dispute over You-Q BV’s attempts to trademark “Beatle,” finding that it isn’t inconceivable that consumers would be led to transfer in their minds a Beatle wheelchair with the goodwill of The Beatles, whose image is “even after 50 years of existence, still synonymous with youth and a certain counter-culture of the 1960s, an image which is still positive and which could specifically benefit the goods covered by the mark applied for.”

Two Democratic Senators, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Charles Schumer of New York, have asked the U.S. Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate whether U.S. law already prohibits employers to force job applicants to surrender their Facebook passwords.

The practice may violate the Stored Communications Act or the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

“Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom spent the first few weeks after his arrest in prison, with the US government arguing that he posed a flight risk…”

New York City is a hotbed of technological innovation, but many of its public school students aren’t graduating with the skills needed to be a part of “Silicon Alley,” as it’s known. Scott Schwaitzberg, vice president of Activate, is planning to fix that problem by helping to build a public high school designed to teach the city’s youth everything they need to know about writing software and the tech industry.