The police force responsible for busting a ring of illegal music downloaders which went by the name of OINK (now that's just begging for trouble) is in danger of being hauled before the beak for copyright theft itself.

The PRS says that only 11 of the 43 UK forces have paid for the right to play music in canteens and social areas at nicks up and down the country.

"We continue to assess the position and are seeking advice to determine if we are required by law to spend a significant amount of public money, which we consider is better committed to crime fighting, in this way."

US president George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney head up the list of federal officials named in a lawsuit filed Thursday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) over the government's continuing warrantless wiretapping of citizens' phone and Internet traffic.

EFF senior staff lawyer Kevin Bankston said, "In addition to suing AT&T, we've now opened a second front in the battle to stop the NSA's illegal surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans and hold personally responsible those who authorized or participated in the spying program."

Over a period of twelve hours, between this Thursday night and Friday morning, American Rights Counsel LLC sent out over 4000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, all making copyright infringement claims against videos with content critical of the Church of Scientology.

Whether or not American Rights Counsel, LLC represents the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology is unclear, but this would not be the first time that the Church of Scientology has used the DMCA to silence Scientology critics.

There's been a lot of debate on Threat Level recently about what's a federal crime and what is not when it comes to file sharing copyrighted music on the internet.

A 27-year-old California man, Kevin Cogill, of Culver City, learned the hard way Wednesday.

If convicted, he faces a maximum three years imprisonment under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005.

J.K. Rowling has been an aggressive user of intellectual property laws against anyone who she feels has done her wrong, and Warner Bros. studio, which owns the rights to the movies has been equally aggressive at times.

The movie makers insist their Hari Puttar has nothing to do with Harry Potter. The storylines are entirely different. Hari is a popular Indian name and Puttar means "son" in Punjabi. Plus, when pronounced correctly, it doesn't even sound like Harry Potter.

If anything, all this effort is doing is providing a lot more free publicity for the Hari Puttar movie -- which may be exactly what the movie makers wanted.

A Canadian bus company wants to shut down an upstart online car-pooling service called PickupPal, and even PickupPal's founder admits that his service is violating current Ontario law. But, in his view, it's the law that needs to change, not PickupPal.

Ontario has one of the strictest carpooling laws in the world. People who share rides can only travel from home to work and back again, must ride with the same driver every day, and can only pay by the week, among other restrictions.

PickupPal wants to draw a distinction between one-off ride-sharing to concerts or when traveling home on break and regular passenger services that really should be licensed by the state.

Atlantic v. Andersen, has finally drawn to a close, as the RIAA was forced to pay Ms. Andersen $107,951, representing the amount of her attorneys fee judgment plus interest.

And that's where Phase II comes in, Andersen v. Atlantic. There the shoe is on the other foot, and Tanya is one doing the hunting, as she pursues the record companies and their running dogs for malicious prosecution.

The federal judge who presided over the nation's only peer-to-peer copyright-infringement trial announced from the bench here Monday that he is likely to declare a mistrial.

At issue is whether the RIAA needs to prove that copyrighted music offered by a defendant on a peer-to-peer network was actually downloaded by anyone.

The judge's decision, which he said would be issued "hopefully before the end of September," is likely to have wide-ranging implications in the RIAA's file-sharing litigation campaign -- 20,000 lawsuits and counting.

Tenise Barker, the young social worker from the Bronx who took on the RIAA's 'making available' theory and won, has now launched a challenge to the constitutionality of the RIAA's damages theory.

She says that the Court could avoid having to find the statute unconstitutional by construing the RIAA's complaint as alleging a single copyright infringement - the use of an 'online media distribution system' - and limiting the total recovery to $750. In the alternative, she argues, if the Court feels it cannot avoid the question, it should simply limit the plaintiffs' damages to $3.50 per song file, since awarding more - against a single noncommercial user, for a single upload or download of an MP3 file for personal use - would be unconstitutional.

TorrentSpy may be gone but its attorneys continue to allege in court that the motion picture industry engaged in a spying campaign against the company as well as others, including the Pirate Bay.

TorrentSpy's attorney, Ira Rothken, said last August: "We believe that the MPAA, when it paid $15,000 for about 30 pages of e-mails, knew or should have known they were involved in purchasing something in a wrongful manner."