Inventor-link purports to prohibit visitors to the site from using the company's name, linking to the site, or even "refer[ring]" to it without permission. Although the enforceability of these terms is extremely dubious, the company is nevertheless invoking them in an attempt to stop criticism of the company that appears on InventorEd.org, a website that provides information about invention promotion businesses and scams.

Inventor-link is represented by Dozier Internet Law -- the same law firm that threatened to sue for copyright infringement if one of its demand letters were posted on the Internet.

The firm's "User Agreement" prohibits linking to its website, using the firm's name "in any manner" without permission (the license specifically provides that even clients cannot say they are represented by the firm without asking), or making "any copies of any part of this website in any way since we do not want anyone copying us." These terms would appear to prevent even criticizing the terms themselves, as this post does, by linking to and quoting from them. And, very strangely, the terms prohibit even looking at the website's HTML code.

DirectBuy is a company that claims to offer a deal on furniture and home supplies by letting consumers buy directly from the manufacturer. Apparently, the company doesn't want you to hear from customers who don't think the deal is such a good one.

Nevertheless, DirectBuy's lawyer, Donald Morris, relies on an extraordinarily broad reading of the Ninth Circuit's decision in Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com to claim that InfomercialRatings.com is liable for "encourag[ing] and solicit[ing] defamatory statements." Even worse, Morris threatens to file suit in Canada, because DirectBuy does business there in addition to the United States. And, to top it off, he claims that his threat letter is copyrighted, and that to post it online would give rise to copyright liability.

First, the letter is not registered with the copyright office, and until it is, DirectBuy's law firm can't sue to enforce it. Second, posting the letter is a clear example of fair use.

Authorities in several countries have cracked down on Nigerian e-mail scammers, resulting in the seizure of over $2.1 billion in fraudulent checks. The National Consumers League, in conjunction with the US Postal Inspection Service, announced yesterday that 77 arrests have been made in connection with the scams.

"The most important thing consumers need to know to protect themselves from fake check scams is that there is no legitimate reason why anyone would give you a check or money order and ask you to wire money anywhere in return," NCL VP Susan Grant said in a statement. "No matter the details of the scheme—whether they're trying to purchase something from you, asking for your help moving money around, or saying you've won a foreign lottery—it's a scam."

During an occasionally testy cross examination, a Sony executive said what many observers have suspected for a long time. The RIAA's four-year-old lawsuit campaign is costing the music industry millions of dollars and is a big money-loser for the record labels.

One of the biggest bombshells from the cross-examination was Pariser's admission that the RIAA's legal campaign isn't making the labels any money, and that, furthermore, the industry has no idea of the actual damages it suffers due to file-sharing.

"We haven't stopped to calculate the amount of damages we've suffered due to downloading, but that's not what's at issue here," replied Pariser, who was reminded by Judge Michael Davis to answer the questions actually asked by Toder, not hypotheticals.

Toder then pressed the Sony executive on the question of how many people actually downloaded music from the defendant. "We don't know," she replied.

The next line of questioning was how many suits the RIAA has filed so far. Pariser estimated the number at a "few thousand." "More like 20,000," suggested Toder. "That's probably an overstatement," Pariser replied. She then made perhaps the most startling comment of the day. Saying that the record labels have spent "millions" on the lawsuits, she then said that "we've lost money on this program."

As Pariser admitted under oath today, the entire campaign is a money pit.

In testimony in the flagship Capitol Records, et al versus Jammie Thomas Jennifer Pariser, case, the head of litigation for Sony BMG told the world that it was piracy for someone to back-up a CD they have bought or upload it onto their MP3 player.

She said that when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, Sony can say he stole a song." Making "a copy" of a purchased song is just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'.

This suggests that punters have no 'fair use' rights to make backups of the music that they have purchased.

Having found the necessary proof via the leaked MediaDefenders documents, the Pirate Bay is filing suit against the big record and movie labels operating in Sweden who have allegedly been paying professional hackers, saboteurs and DDoSers to destroy their trackers. They also claim to have filed a police report.

In a new embarrassment for the Bush administration's top spymaster, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is withdrawing an assertion he made to Congress this week that a recently passed electronic-surveillance law helped U.S. authorities foil a major terror plot in Germany.

Four intelligence-community officials, who asked for anonymity discussing sensitive material, said the new law, dubbed the "Protect America Act," played little if any role in the unraveling of the German plot. The U.S. military initially provided information that helped the Germans uncover the plot. But that exchange of information took place months before the new "Protect America" law was passed.

The developments were cited by Democratic critics on Capitol Hill as the latest example of the Bush administration's exaggerated claims - and contradictory statements - about ultrasecret surveillance activities.

Within the last few weeks, there have been a number of reports by Comcast customers claiming that their BitTorrent downloads and uploads have been capped--or worse, blocked. TorrentFreak recently reported that Comcast, a major U.S. cable company, is using an application from Sandvine to throttle such connections.

BitTorrent traffic accounts for upwards of 25 percent of U.S. Internet traffic, and the techniques used by Comcast are essentially the same as those used by the Great Firewall of China.

Assuming that the SYN packet goes through, the three-way handshake is allowed to happen, then the two hosts will be able to begin communicating.

According to TorrentFreak, Comcast is not doing this. They are instead sending a reset (or RST) packet to the Comcast customer, pretending to be from the host at the end of the BitTorrent connection. It is extremely important to note that when Comcast creates and sends this packet, it does not identify itself as the the source of packet, but instead impersonates one of the parties involved in the BitTorrent connection. This is where things get rather shady.

Many states make it illegal for an individual to impersonate another individual. New York, a state notorious for its aggressive pro-consumer office of the Attorney General, makes it a crime for someone to "[impersonate] another and [do] an act in such assumed character with intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another."

The Bush administration is signaling that it plans to turn once again to a favorite legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege to try to shut down a lawsuit brought against a Belgium banking cooperative that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the U.S. government, court documents show.

The "state secrets" privilege, allowing the government to shut down public litigation on national security grounds, was once a rarely used tool. But the Bush administration has turned to it dozens of times in terrorism-related cases in seeking to end public discussion of everything from an FBI whistle-blower's claims to the abduction of a German terrorism suspect.

Bush administration officials have defended the banking data program as an important tool in its war on terror, but European regulators and privacy advocates were quick to denounce the program as improper and possibly illegal, and the pressure forced Swift and U.S. officials earlier this year to agree to tighter restrictions on how the data could be used.

German government plods are asking to be allowed to email Trojan horse spyware to terrorist suspects in order to surrepticiously monitor their Internet use and inspect their computer hard drives remotely, the Associated Press reports.

The spyware would be hidden in emails appearing to have been sent from other, seemingly innocuous government agencies such as the Finance Ministry or Youth Services Office.

Do German gumshoes believe that real terrorists won't have capable antivirus and antispyware software installed? One can imagine they'll probably be immune anyway, because they're likely already running OS/X, BSD or Linux.