Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin and the city of Memphis have filed a lawsuit to learn who operates a blog harshly critical of Godwin and his department.

"In what could be a landmark case of privacy and the 1st Amendment," the anonymous bloggers write on the site, "Godwin has illegally used his position and the City of Memphis as a ram to ruin the Constitution of the United States.

The bloggers also said city attorneys earlier this year wrote a threatening letter on city letterhead to a company that produced T-shirts for the bloggers.

The US federal Communications Commission is likely to punish Comcast for breaking net neutrality laws.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told AP that the commission had adopted a set of principles that protects consumers' access to the Internet and Comcast's actions violated them.

Martin will order Comcast to stop its practice of blocking, provide details to the extent and manner in which the practice has been used and to disclose to consumers details on future plans for managing its network going forward.

Now that the bill has become law, it seems that the protests are only getting much, much louder, going beyond the initial group of bloggers complaining to the mainstream press, and including large companies like Google and Telia moving servers out of Sweden to protect their users.

Amazingly, the politicians who approved this bill are staying largely silent, despite the growing clamor about it.

While it's unclear what will happen here, this is just the latest in a long line of recent efforts to bring together people to call attention to questionable political moves that politicians in the past have been able to sneak through with little public scrutiny.

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom's copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already reacted, calling the order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection act that "threatens to expose deeply private information."

Viacom also requested YouTube's source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google's advertising database schema.

Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons.

"Requiring proof of actual transfers would cripple efforts to enforce copyright owners' rights online." See, there's just one problem with this. The law isn't designed to make it easy to enforce copyright owners rights. It's designed to make sure that only the guilty party is actually blamed for breaking the law.

So, once again, we have the RIAA trying to cloud the issue. Oh yeah, and, of course, the RIAA can't resist using its bogus arguments that international treaties require US courts to treat making available as distribution.

The Motion Picture Association of America has helped convict an administrator for EliteTorrents.org, a peer-to-peer site, of felony copyright infringement and conspiracy, the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday.

Homeland Security agents from several divisions served search warrants on 10 people around the country suspected of being involved with the Elite Torrents site, and took over the group's main server.

Dove faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in September, the Justice Department said.

Prince has become fantastically anti-fan, and day-by-day seems to be destroying his reputation. It started with threatening fan sites, quickly followed up by lawsuits against YouTube, eBay and the Pirate Bay, and more recently has involved a bizarre and ill-advised strategy of taking down YouTube videos that he probably had no right to take down.

The latest case involves fifty Norwegian musicians, who teamed up with a Norwegian record label to create what they thought was a nice 50th birthday present for Prince: a "tribute" album with 81 covers of Prince songs.

What they didn't expect was for Prince, instead, to turn around and sue the label and all fifty musicians. He's also demanding that all copies of the album be destroyed.

It would appear that the recording industry now likes to call any sort of business model it doesn't like "piracy." At least that's the only explanation I can come up with in its latest battle, where it has referred to traditional radio as "a form of piracy."

The idea that radio is a form of piracy is simply laughable. We've already pointed to the industry's own proof (payola) that radio helps promote artists. As for the definitional difference between fees and taxes, fees are agreed upon between two parties. A tax is a fee required by the government.

Gmail users in Germany were likely surprised late last week when instead of gaining access to their email, they were greeted with a mysterious message from the folks at Google.

"We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we're called Google Mail here instead. If you're traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com. Oh, and we'd like to link the URL above, but we're not allowed to do that either. Bummer."

Google's action stems from a German court decision in July 2007, which ruled that Google could no longer use "Gmail" for its email services based on Giersch's trademark.

The Motion Picture Association of America said Friday intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement.

"Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances," MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.