Chinese telecom manufacturer Huawei Technologies has filed a lawsuit against Motorola, accusing the technology giant of trying to transfer Huawei's intellectual property to Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) without permission.

"Motorola... has not responded with assurances that it will prevent disclosure of that information to NSN," Huawei said in a statement. "If Huawei's proprietary commercial property and information is transferred to a third party, Huawei will suffer irreparable commercial damage."

The RIAA, no stranger to playing the bogeyman when it comes to technological change, is concerned that .music, for example, could be used to encourage copyright infringement.

"We strongly urge you to take these concerns seriously... we prefer a practical solution to these issues, and hope to avoid the need to escalate the issue further."

Regardless, the RIAA's argument that .music equals piracy is pretty poor, possibly disingenuous, and unlikely to influence the Guidebook.

David Pitchford, a Florida trailer park resident, names Assange and WikiLeaks as defendants in a personal injury suit filed with the Florida Southern District Court in Miami.

In the complaint filed on 6th January, Pitchford alleges that Assange's negligence has caused "hypertension", "depression" and "living in fear of being stricken by another heart attack and/or stroke" as a result of living "in fear of being on the brink of another nucliar [sic] WAR".

The court filing stipulates Pitchford's demand for $1.5 million in damages.

The US government has subpoenaed the social networking site Twitter for personal details of people connected to Wikileaks, court documents show.

The San Francisco-based website was given three days to respond was also told not to disclose that it had been served the subpoena, or the existence of the investigation.

However, the same court removed those restrictions on Wednesday and authorised Twitter to disclose the order to its customers.

In a filing made public today, Microsoft is seeking a patent for something it calls "One-Way Public Relationships" in social networks and other online properties.

Unless there's some innovative nuance hidden in the text of the application, it seems like Microsoft could face an uphill climb in its quest for a patent on this one.

Manning's supporters say that he is in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day; this could be construed as a form of torture. This month visitors reported that his mental and physical health was deteriorating.

He was charged in July with leaking classified material including video posted by WikiLeaks of a 2007 US attack in Baghdad by a Apache helicopter that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver.

Ken Ford, the lawyer behind the Adult Copyright Company, has just had his business model chopped off at the knees; not only did Judge John Preston Bailey dismiss every defendant but one in Ford's mass lawsuits, he also demanded that each case be filed separately and that Ford only submit IP addresses likely to map to West Virginia Internet users.

In a series of orders today that cover all seven of Ford's initial September cases, the judge "severed" every defendant but one. If Ford wants to proceed against all these people, he can do so individually and pay the $350 per case filing fee. (For the cases severed yesterday, this would amount to $1.8 million in filing fees alone.)

Three California men have pleaded guilty charges they built a network of CAPTCHA-solving computers that flooded online ticket vendors and snatched up the very best seats for Bruce Springsteen concerts, Broadway productions and even TV tapings of Dancing with the Stars.

They had to create shell corporations, register hundreds of fake Internet domains (one was stupidcellphone.com) and sign up for thousands of bogus e-mail addresses to make the scam work.

The official YouTube video channel of American glam legends Kiss has been closed for breaching copyright laws - just weeks after bassist Gene Simmons controversially called for all rights breakers to be sued and jailed.

Simmons recently angered online communities by stating: "Make sure there are no incursions. Sue everybody. Be litigious. Take their homes, their cars. Don't let anybody cross that line."

Accused file-swapper Jammie Thomas-Rasset was yesterday hit with a $1.5 million fine for downloading and distributing tunes by Richard Marx, Journey, Def Leppard, the Goo Goo Dolls, No Doubt, and others. Each of the 24 songs at issue in the case cost her $62,500. Meanwhile, the same offense in Germany might cost you €15 ($21) a song.

The cases are certainly not identical in their details, but they nicely illustrate just how different approaches to copyright infringement can be.