Four enterprising prison inmates have been accused of trying to blackmail their way out of jail after they copyrighted their names and then demanded millions of dollars from jail officials for using them without permission.

Russell Dean Landers, Clayton Heath Albers, Carl Ervin Batts and Barry Dean Bischof allegedly sent demand notices for payment to the warden of the El Reno federal prison in Oklahoma City and filed claims against his property.

Believing the warden's property had been seized, the inmates allegedly said they would not return it unless they were released from prison, according to the indictment.

The four and another man, who allegedly assisted in their scheme, have been charged with conspiring to impede the duties of federal prison officials and with mailing threatening communications with the intent to extort.

If convicted, they each face up to 16 more years in prison and a £250,000 fine.

Debbie Foster's battle with the RIAA appears to be finally over. Today, a federal judge in Oklahoma closed the book on Capitol v. Foster by awarding her $68,685.23 in attorneys' fees, a ruling first reported by Ray Beckerman's blog.

Foster was sued by the RIAA in November 2004 for copyright infringement. She denied infringement and began a legal fight against the music industry. In July 2005, the labels added her adult daughter Amanda Foster to the suit.

Judge West decided that $68,685.23 was adequate to compensate Barringer-Thompson and her legal staff for the time spent litigating the case. He also rejected the RIAA's argument that Foster was not entitled to fees incurred after "some point when she allegedly 'could have avoided [fees] altogether but chose not to do so,'" reiterating that she was fully entitled to fight the RIAA's charges and as a result, eligible for an award of attorneys' fees.

What's the cost of file-sharing? For Terri Frye of Hickory, NC, it was $300. That's the amount she'll have to pay the RIAA after agreeing to a judgment in a file-sharing case. Frye is a single mother living in state-supported housing who received one of the RIAA's settlement letters in November 2005.

Despite contacting Frye in late 2005, the RIAA did not actually file suit until March of this year. In the intervening period, Frye repeatedly informed the RIAA that they had the wrong person.

The end result is that the RIAA likely spent thousands of dollars to obtain a $300 judgment. And although Frye agrees to be enjoined against future copyright infringement, she does not admit to any wrongdoing.

MediaSentry flagged 706 songs on the computer that became the basis for the lawsuit, and at $750 per song, that works out to a total of $529,500. The RIAA settled for a minuscule fraction of that number, one curiously close to the 70¢-per-track figure a record industry attorney said is close to the labels' share of each track sold.

n Interscope v. Does 1-7, an ex parte proceeding in the Eastern District of Virginia, in Newport News, Virginia, in a 5-page decision by Judge Walter D. Kelley, Jr., the Court denied the RIAA's ex parte motion for an order granting discovery into the identities of students at the College of William & Mary.

This is the second such ex parte motion of which we are aware that has been denied recently, the first being Capitol v. Does 1-16, in which the RIAA sought information about University of New Mexico students.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment is suing a company that developed antipiracy software for CDs, claiming the technology was defective and cost the record company millions of dollars to settle consumer complaints and government investigations.

The music company accuses Amergence of negligence, unfair business practices and breaching the terms of its license agreement by delivering software that "did not perform as warranted."

It began including MediaMax on some of its compact discs in August 2003 and shipped about 4 million CDs equipped with the technology in 2005.

The program restricted the number of copies of a CD that a user could make. Some users reported problems when the CDs were played on their computers.

The fallout over the copy-protected CDs sparked lawsuits and investigations.

There's already a long history of them suing the easiest party for them to find rather than the party actually breaking the law, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise to see them doing so again. Apparently the MPAA has sued some sites that create a directory of online videos, mainly TV shows and movies. These sites do not host the files. They simply point people to where they are online. Effectively, it's the same thing that a search engine like Google does. There are plenty of Google searches that will lead you to unauthorized content, but for some reason, the entertainment industry believes that if you make a specialized search engine or directory you're somehow liable.

It will definitely be worth watching how these court cases go, because if the MPAA succeeds, it effectively means that they'll have the right to sue anyone who links to infringing content by claiming inducement.

Tanya Andersen, the plaintiff here, is the single mother in Oregon that the RIAA prosecuted for the last couple of years and then "on the eve of summary judgment" dropped the lawsuit with prejudice. Her counterclaims remain and are restated here and supplemented. It will soon be joined into a single case. So, what started as Atlantic v. Andersen has now turned around, and it is now Andersen v. Atlantic and the defendants are the music companies making up the RIAA -- Atlantic, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG and BMG -- the RIAA itself, the Settlement Support Center, and SafeNet, formerly known as MediaSentry. She is asserting claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the RICO Act, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.

Measures moving through Congress, including a requirement for travelers in some countries to register travel plans online 48 hours before departure, have raised fears in Europe of disruptions in the trans-Atlantic flow of business and leisure travel.

Along with online registration, the updated program would require new and existing member countries to improve data-sharing; more rigorously report lost and stolen passports (not just blank passports); and guarantee they will repatriate nationals if those people are ordered out of the United States.

"It's really a 21st-century model," said James Carafano, a Heritage Foundation analyst who specializes in homeland security. "It'll all be done electronically and biometrically. And it really doesn't compromise your privacy."

We've been covering the ongoing dispute between the US and Antigua over online gambling for more than seven years, and to be honest, Antigua has been quite patient with the games that the US is playing.

In 2004, the WTO agreed and ruled that the US had no right to try to control Antigua-based online casinos. The US promptly ignored the WTO ruling.

A few months later, the WTO did the equivalent of stomping its feet and demanding that the US change its rules, and the US promptly ignored them. Earlier this year, the WTO again sided with Antigua, but since there's been no consequences from ignoring WTO rulings on the matter, the US pretty much shrugged. When pressed, US officials claimed that the US was going to get around the fact that they were breaking treaty obligations by... changing the treaty.

Other countries are lining up to support Antigua, but it doesn't seem likely that it's going to change US policy much. We're still waiting to see if Antigua will follow the suggestions that have gone around to set up free music download sites in Antigua as retaliation, since asking the US to fix things isn't getting it very far.

Internet radio station Atlanta Blue Skye LLC has warned Radu-Cristian Fotescu, a Romania-based technology enthusiast and prolific blogger, that his Beranger.org blog has been "copied" and turned over to its lawyers. The issue stems from Fotescu's posting of a widely known workaround for bypassing JavaScript functions that try to disable a mouse's right-click context menu functionality, and the posting of information gathered from the Properties function of Windows Media Player.

In an attempt to prevent copying the stream URL into another music player, Atlanta Blue Skye LLC Web developers employed an old JavaScript trick to prevent users from accessing the context popup menu by disabling the ability to right-click on any elements of the radio stream's Web page.

Bypassing the right-click disabling function is arguably as old as the function itself, and is well-documented on the Web. By using the Esc key workaround, Fotescu was able to access the Web browser's context menu and discover the new stream URLs and posted both the addresses and the one-sentence procedure for bypassing the JavaScript right-click disabling function on his Beranger.org blog.