Google is at daggers end with a law firm it's been using since 2008, after discovering that lawyers in the law firm, named Pepper Hamilton LLP, were representing a patent licensing business that sued Google's Android partners last month.

It is now apparent that with so much patent litigation among technology companies there is bound to be some overlap, among lawyers.

Mark Zuckerberg faces a tax liability of more than $1.5bn this year, vaulting the Facebook co-founder into the leagues of all-time highest taxpayers and leaving a big question mark over his company’s initial public offering.

News of the Facebook co-founder’s vast impending tax liability comes amid a national debate in the US over whether the country’s top earners are paying enough in taxes.

Several of Ubisoft's biggest titles won't be playable as of next week thanks to a server move by the publisher and the restrictive DRM that was used in their development.

Because Ubisoft thought it would be a smart plan to use always on DRM for even the single player portion of games like Assassin's Creed, even the single player portion of that title won't be playable during the server move.

Those people paid money for your game and they won't be able to play it. If you didn't pay, downloaded illegally, pirated, you'll be able to play fine.

What drew the most ire recently was the release of Zynga’s Dream Heights, a clone of Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower, which also happened to be last year’s iPhone Game of the Year.

Pincus once famously said “I don’t f***ing want innovation. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”

There’s no “inspiration” here, only thievery. Yes, they change the code and draw up new artwork to avoid any legal trouble (after getting in hot water for not doing that when they stole Farmville), but it’s the bare minimum to avoid legal retribution.

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required.

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law,” Google wrote.

US special agents monitoring Twitter spotted Leigh Van Bryan's messages weeks before he left for a holiday in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting.

Leigh, 26, was kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers. The Department of Homeland Security flagged up Leigh as a potential threat when he posted a Twitter message to his pals ahead of his trip to Hollywood.

It read: "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America".

"The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist. I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet but they just told me 'You've really f***ed up with that tweet, boy'."

All the photos, video and files stored on file-sharing site Megaupload could be permanently deleted from its servers sometime this week, according to federal prosecutors.

Megaupload's bank accounts have been frozen by federal authorities, preventing the company from paying its hosting bills, Megaupload attorney Ira Rothken told the Associated Press.

"It is important to note that Mega clearly warned users to keep copies of any files they uploaded," the DOJ said.

The shutdown reflects the "increasing crackdown" on intellectual property violations online and it won't be a "big surprise" if similar sites are affected, Lipson said.

Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester will not take his near-£1m bonus, the BBC has learned.

He succumbed to "enormous political and media pressure" despite RBS's board urging him to fight, Peston added.

The Pirate Party of Catalonia is organizing the equivalent of a class-action lawsuit against the FBI in a Spanish court, claiming damages to legitimate users of the file-sharing site Megaupload.

Stating that the FBI has "impeded the access to millions of archives of both private individuals and organizations, potentially causing huge personal, economic and image damages," the Pirate Party also suggests that private data might have been misappropriated by the FBI and other authorities in the course of the investigation, violating privacy rights.

Kader Arif, the European Parliament's rapporteur for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta), resigned over the issue on Friday.

"I condemn the whole process which led to the signature of this agreement: no consultation of the civil society, lack of transparency since the beginning of negotiations, repeated delays of the signature of the text without any explanation given, reject of Parliament's recommendations as given in several resolutions of our assembly."

"However, everything is made to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade."