Lesser said that over the next two months, the five major ISPs funding the CAS—AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon—would ”begin rolling out" their versions of the alert system. Under the CAS, ISPs would pass infringement notices from copyright holders on to their subscribers.

Finally, Lesser explained to Ars that consumers will have to pay $35 to the CAS to initiate a review procedure, which will be refunded if the consumer wins the review.

"This is the first time that there is a multi-stakeholder effort that tries to address these issues in a consumer-friendly way. If we are successful and we see a reduction in piracy and an increase in legal services, there may be a phase two. We need to take this first step and evaluate it."

Zynga, the company that has long been accused of stealing other companies' game concepts and adding the word "Ville" to them, is now accusing a former employee of stealing ideas from them.

In a statement to AllThingsD, a Kixeye spokesperson said that the company is not involved in the suit. "Unfortunately, this appears to be Zynga's new employee retention strategy: Suing former employees to scare current employees into staying."

Meanwhile, Zynga still faces legal challenges of its own, including suits filed by Electronic Arts and Maxis over wholesale copying of EA's The Sims Social for Zynga's The Ville, accusing Zynga of stealing "private information" about the game.

In recent months the number of DMCA takedown requests sent out by copyright holders has increased dramatically, and it’s starting to turn the Internet into a big mess.

This apparent screw up in the automated filter mistakenly attempts to censor AMC Theatres, BBC, Buzzfeed, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, RealClearPolitics, Rotten Tomatoes, ScienceDirect, Washington Post, Wikipedia and even the U.S. Government.

Microsoft and other rightsholders are censoring large parts of the Internet, often completely unfounded, and there is absolutely no one to hold them responsible. Websites can’t possibly verify every DMCA claim and the problem will only increase as more takedown notices are sent week after week.

Downloading pirated material in Japan can now earn you two years in prison and a fine of two million yen ($25,600) for each purloined file, with uploaders facing 10 years in the Big House and a fine five times as large.

The laws – some of the toughest ever enacted against illegal downloaders – were passed in June after strong lobbying from the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ).

In addition to the new penalties, the RIAJ is lobbying ISPs to install software to identify and block illegal uploads at the source. However, such software is buggy in the extreme and has been blamed for numerous outages, including interrupting some of the coverage from NASA when the Curiosity rover was landing, and a recent streaming of the Hugo awards.

Apple is hoping to press its advantage against Samsung Electronics, asking for a court order on wider U.S. ban on its products and an additional $707 million in damages after scoring a victory over the Korean giant last month.

"Indeed, it is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies. " Samsung said.

PersonalWeb is adding to its ridiculous legacy by suing Rackspace as well, though as the complaint makes clear, PersonalWeb seems mighty confused about what it's suing over.

That's because it seems to be claiming that Rackspace is responsible for... GitHub. Now, it isn't just filing about GitHub, but also Rackspace Cloud Servers, which obviously are a Rackspace product.

M-CAM, a company which specializes in analyzing the quality of patents, found PersonalWeb's patents so egregious that it proposed an award named after the examiner on a bunch of them, Khanh B. Pham.

That pattern goes something like this: hear that a huge explosion was averted and lives were saved, find out the plotter was an American citizen, find out he was under investigation by the FBI for several years, and then finally find out that it was the FBI that egged on the suspect and built his "bomb" for him.

"The bomb, which was inert and had been constructed by FBI technicians, didn't explode, according to federal authorities."

Red Hat has taken a unique step in defending itself from a patent infringement claim from Twin Peaks Software: a counterclaim that Twin Peaks is in copyright violation on mount, the file management app that is licensed under the GPLv2.

Curiously, the storage technology that Twin Peaks is claiming as infringed was originally developed by Gluster… but it wasn't until Red Hat acquired Gluster in October 2011 that Twin Peaks got around to suing Gluster and its new owner.

Red Hat's legal-fu is massive, because it's using the fact that there is still a lot of non-compliance of the GPL out there to its clear advantage. And, as Groklaw reported this morning, the risk to Twin Peaks is far greater now.

After his account was connected to a series of previous infringements, a 40 year-old man was summoned to court today. Despite a third-party admitting that the music piracy in question was carried out by them and not the accused, the court still decided to fine the account holder.

According to the Hadopi law it doesn’t matter that the man didn’t carry out the infringements himself – as the owner of the Internet connection in question he is responsible for what happens on it.

Thomas-Rasset, a young Minnesota mom, was the first US file-sharer to take her RIAA-initiated lawsuit all the way to a trial and a verdict back in 2007. Five years, three trials, and one appeal later, she owes $222,000 to the recording industry for sharing songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network, but she doesn't plan to quit fighting.

Thomas-Rasset will follow Joel Tenenbaum, the second US resident to take his file-sharing case that far.