Miami Gardens, Fla., convenience store owner Alex Saleh decided he'd try. He'd become vexed at what he saw as police harassment of his employees and even his customers.

The fact that he has to install cameras in an attempt to prove what he feels is racial profiling, excessive aggression, and intimidation might be a portent of what is to come, as technology becomes ever more involved in everyday life.

"I have already spent 15 months in prison. For several weeks of that time I have been held in solitary confinement. I have been denied visits and phone calls with my family and friends. This plea agreement spares me, my family, and my community a repeat of this grinding process."

"It is kind of funny that here they are sentencing me for hacking Stratfor, but at the same time as I was doing that an FBI informant was suggesting to me foreign targets to hit," he told the newspaper. "So you have to wonder how much they really care about protecting the security of websites."

Retroactive copyright extension is a unilateral change in that deal -- directly taking the work away from the public domain without any recompense to the public the work has been stolen from.

Scholars have pointed out that there is no legitimate reason to do this, no evidence that it does anything useful at all. Instead, there's plenty of evidence that the cost to the public is tremendous -- somewhere around a billion euros. The cost to culture in general is even worse, because the longer copyright terms are, the more works disappear entirely, and the more it harms the dissemination of knowledge. It's basically a disaster all the way around -- except for some old record labels that still have the copyrights.

Tikotzky launched both services earlier this year. Apple-Tracker, along with iPhone-Check, allowed users to input a zip code and subsequently find out whether an iPhone was in stock at local retail stores. The tool was available in the US and scraped Apple's retail store site to identify inventory availability.

This afternoon, that stockpile was finally used for what pretty much everyone suspected it would be used for—launching an all-out patent attack on Google and Android.

Rockstar, meanwhile, was pretty unapologetic about embracing the "patent troll" business model. Most trolls, of course, aren't holding thousands of patents from gigantic technology companies.

Rockstar's CEO was quite straightforward about his belief that whatever promises Microsoft and Apple might have made about how they'll use their patents, those promises don't apply to Rockstar. “We are separate,” he says. “That does not apply to us.”

The U.S. National Security Agency sought the Japanese government’s cooperation in 2011 over wiretapping fiber-optic cables carrying phone and Internet data across the Asia-Pacific region, but the request was rejected, sources said Saturday.

The NSA asked Tokyo if it could intercept personal information from communication data passing through Japan via cables connecting it, China and other regional areas, including Internet activity and phone calls, they said.

As it stands now, post-1972 recordings are clearly covered by federal law (and DMCA safe harbors apply). Pre-1972 recordings are subject to a variety of state laws and, according to the New York court's ruling, are not subject to the DMCA or its safe harbors.

The labels claim "thousands" of violations on songs that cost "millions" to produce and are seeking to collect both statutory and compensatory damages, as well as "unjust profits" and court costs.

How far gone are we down the intellectual property rabbit hole when projects like this, which people love, and which don't (in any way) harm the original offering, are shuttered? Because whatever your thoughts about copyright in general, if there is one industry for which the never ending copyright extensions make zero sense, it's for video games.

We're at the 28 year mark for Super Mario Bros. Imagine how stupid this is all going to look in 95 years. As the article notes, even those who think gaming companies need some copyright protection should be able to see how ridiculous current lengths are.

Parham said it all started when her son had made the hand-drawn picture of the bomb during the weekend at home. Parham said Rhett is a fan of the video game Bomber Man and drew the cartoon-ish like explosive.

"They actually reiterated to me they knew he was non-violent," said Parham said on Monday. "They knew he was not actually having a bomb, creating or making a bomb. But that they could not go with out making an example of him and take some type of action because they were worried about their perception. Perception is actually the word he used. Perception is reality, and parents might think you have a bomb or [might be] violent."

The U.S. government in July obtained a search warrant demanding that Edward Snowden’s e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, according to to newly unsealed documents.

Lavabit founder Ladar Levison balked at the demand, and the government filed a motion to compel Lavabit to comply. Lavabit told the feds that the user had “enabled Lavabit’s encryption services, and thus Lavabit would not provide the requested information,” the government wrote.