The lawyer representing Malaika Brooks said Monday that the court's 2-1 decision sanctioned "pain compliance" tactics through a modern-day version of the cattle prod.

"Although she had told the officers she was seven months pregnant, they proceeded to use a Taser on her, not once but three times, causing her to scream with pain and leaving burn marks and permanent scars."

An officer was holding Brooks' arm behind Brooks' back while she was being shocked.

A federal appeals court rebuked a Pennsylvania district attorney who threatened to file felony child pornography charges against teens who were photographed semi-nude unless they attended an "education program."

When the parent of the girl who posed in her bathing suit publicly complained, Skumanick responded that she was posing "provocatively" and concluded by saying: "These are the rules. If you don't like them, too bad."

The offending image of Nancy Doe showed the teen in a "white, opaque towel, just below her breasts, appearing as if she just had emerged from the shower," according to the decision.

First, there was the Macintosh. Then it was the iPod, the iPhone, and now the iPad. Next up in Apple's arsenal: The lawyers.

And even though this particular suit may start with HTC, Apple could end up battling much larger companies Google and Microsoft if it aggressively advances its patent war.

Apple has named the patents in question, but it hasn't yet defined how its sees HTC violating these patents.

They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission.

The Court ruled that RapidShare must monitor user uploads to ensure that none of the book titles are put onto their servers and go on to ensure that the public never gains access to copies that somehow slip through this filtering.

According to Inside Higher Ed, every time a prohibited book named in the injunction is made available on RapidShare it could cost the company up to 250,000 euros ($339,000) or even earn company bosses 2 years in jail.

eBay Germany is being investigated by competition authorities concerned that its tying of PayPal to certain eBay purchases is in breach of consumer law.

The FCO said it had yet to launch a full investigation but was looking into the complaints. The regulator noted that the rule change meant sellers were charged an extra 1.9 per cent on sales made.

eBay has already got into trouble in Australia where it tried to force almost all transactions to go through PayPal. Users were unimpressed, as were Ozzie consumer protection groups, and eBay performed a swift U-turn. Similar moves in the US also went down badly.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families.

The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.

The state's "Subversive Activities Registration Act," passed last year and now officially on the books, states that "every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States ... shall register with the Secretary of State."

While the court eventually did (much to many people's surprise) say that copyright holders do need to take fair use into account, it's not really clear what sort of punishment there is for those who do not.

Given how massive the damage awards can be for simple (even incidental or accidental) copyright infringement, the fact that there is barely any real punishment for bogus copyright claims seems incredibly one-sided and unfair.

More than 150 people have approached consumer publication Which? Computing claiming to have been wrongly targeted in crackdowns on illegal file-sharing.

Andrew Crossley, of ACS:Law, said that some cases had been dropped although he declined to give numbers.

Some are already in the process of going to court, he told BBC News, although the majority of the accused settle out of court.