Sony BMG, a company known for enforcing its intellectual property rights, is now facing the other end of an Intellectual Property related lawsuit.

PointDev, a small software company, mandated a bailiff to raid one of Sony BMGs owned building in January this year. The raid revealed that four of the Sony BMGs owned servers contained the pirated software.

It appears as though the company discovered this when an IT department employee requested assistance for the use of a product called Ideal Migration. When technical support looked into the case, they discovered that the key used to activate the software was a pirated version.

Sony told La Province to not report on the ongoing investigation. Clearly, Sony is not happy that this case was made public at all.

The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.

Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year.

A CNET News.com review of legal documents shows that courts have approved of this technique, even though it raises questions about entrapment, the problems of identifying who's using an open wireless connection--and whether anyone who clicks on a FBI link that contains no child pornography should be automatically subject to a dawn raid by federal police.

Using the same logic and legal arguments, federal agents could send unsolicited e-mail messages to millions of Americans advertising illegal narcotics or child pornography--and raid people who click on the links embedded in the spam messages.

For the fourth year running, FBI director Robert Mueller said the agency reguilarly goes beyond its legal limits to collect information on people's emails and web wibbling.

In an interesting twist, Mueller tried to claim that this wasn't really the FBI's fault. The telcoms companies the snoops roped in on the cunning plan kept providing "too much information", he said.

Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy has a right moan about the state of affairs: "There has to be a better chain of command for this. You cannot just have an FBI agent who decides he'd like to obtain Americans' records, bank records or anything else and do it just because they want to."

MobiTV sent a letter to Howardforums.com, asking the site to take down links that provide MobiTV streams from Fox News, MSNBC, Animal Planet and other networks when entered in the Web browsers of certain phones.

"These feeds do not appear to be protected in any way, and it appears anyone with a compatible phone can view them," Chui wrote in a posting. He questioned why MobiTV was operating its service without authenticating its subscribers.

A MobiTV lawyer responded that the specific MobiTV Web address was obtained in violation of the company's intellectual property rights, according to Chui.

Tanya Andersen, the single mother who filed a countersuit against the RIAA after the organization mistakenly sued her for sharing music online, attempted to hold it responsible for all sorts of heavy infractions ("RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of 'outrage,' and deceptive business practices").

This information would likely be held under a confidential seal, but if lawsuits over mold, tobacco, and asbestos are any indication, the RIAA's secrets will likely leak out into the legal community at large, potentially culminating in a class action suit.

Even without a class action lawsuit, the RIAA nutshell is likely to split wide open after Andersen's case hits the discovery phase, causing problems in subsequent cases.

An effort at damage control has snowballed into a public relations disaster for a Swiss bank seeking to crack down on a renegade Web site for posting classified information about some of its wealthy clients.

In federal court in San Francisco, the bank asked a judge to take down the site. Much to the outrage of free speech advocates and others, the judge did.

But instead of the information disappearing, it rocketed through cyberspace, landing on other Web sites and Wikileaks' own "mirror" sites outside the U.S.

Masnick said the bank's lawsuit demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such legal actions in the Internet age, when anyone with a computer and online connection can thumb his nose at a judge's ruling and resurrect the "banned" information elsewhere.

The Pirate Bay's servers do not store copyrighted material but offer links to the download location of films, TV programmes, albums and software.

Prosecutor Hakan Roswall said the website was commercially exploiting copyright-protected work because it was financed through advertising revenues.

In an interview with the BBC's technology programme Click last year Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde said: "I think it's okay to copy. They get their money from so many places that the sales is just one small part."

John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of global music body, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries, said: "The operators of The Pirate Bay have always been interested in making money, not music."

It's been expected for a while, but reports are coming out that Swedish prosecutors will finally get around to filing charges against The Pirate Bay this week.

When the actual lawsuit is announced, expect quotes from the RIAA and MPAA about what a big deal this is -- but the only really big deal is how little this lawsuit will do to help the industry. It won't help them adjust to a changing market. It won't help them to adopt necessary new business models. It will only increase the attention given to the Pirate Bay and other sites. We've seen this before with Napster. We've seen this before with Grokster. We've seen this before with Kazaa. So why does the entertainment industry keep doing this?

Part of the reason the RIAA is so relentless with its legal campaign against file-sharing in the US is that the group can readily obtain the names and addresses of broadband subscribers via John Doe lawsuits. In contrast, the motion picture and music industries have had mixed results with that strategy in Europe, and one firm retained by Big Content is under fire in Switzerland for what the Swiss government says are illegal tactics.

Unlike US law, which allows the identity of an ISP subscriber to be revealed via a civil action, Swiss law requires a criminal case to be filed in order for the data to be divulged.

Logistep has sidestepped that requirement by having prosecutors file criminal copyright infringement cases against suspected file-sharers. Once the company learns the identity of the alleged infringer, it files a civil lawsuit. The prosecutors will then typically drop the criminal case.

All too often, we're seeing the DMCA abused by people who aren't using it to takedown copyright infringing materials, but to shut down sites they don't like. The latest example involves some filmmakers and a movie review site. The review certainly was not particularly positive, leading to a rather random series of complaints and threats against its author.

It's difficult to see how a review of a movie can infringe on the copyrights of that movie unless it was showing the movie itself (which does not appear to be the case). It's worth pointing out that a DMCA takedown notice is only supposed to be for copyright infringing material, so including charges of libel and defamation in the takedown seem rather unnecessary. Even more amusingly, though, the takedown notice includes a bunch of random charges that aren't actually illegal, such as: "linking to other websites without any authorization to do so."