Details of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, will criminalise "attempting" to infringe copyright.

It means that you can go to prison for one to 10 years for trying to copy a music CD and failing. In another move you could get life in prison for using a pirated copy of Windows on your home PC.

It will be possible for the FBI to get a wire tap to see if you are using pirated software. Anyone who uses counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be sent down for life.

Homeland Security will be allowed to use its terrorist search powers on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It would notify the RIAA when its sniffers detected "unauthorised fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance" are found.

Other copyright holders will not get the benefit of this service.

Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc could face a possible lawsuit for failing to include measures to control access to copyrighted material in products such as Vista OS, iTunes and the iPod, two companies have warned.

Media Rights Technologies and BlueBeat.com have issued cease and desist letters to both companies and to Adobe Systems Inc and Real Networks -- which produce the Adobe Flash Player and Real Player respectively -- for actively avoiding their X1 SeCure Recording Control, which they said is an effective copyright protection system.

Computer security is a complex issue, and there is no simple cure-all. But one thing that continues to baffle me is the way we bank online. Think about the Web address of your bank. It probably ends in one of the common top-level domains: ".com" if you're in the United States, or, depending on your home country, in something like ".uk," ".de," ".jp," or ".ru."

Why do banks and other financial institutions operate under the public top-level domains, like .com? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body that creates new top-level domains, should create a new, secure domain just for this reason—something like ".bank," for example.

Registering new domains under such a top-level domain could then be restricted to bona fide financial organizations. And the price for the domain wouldn’t be just a few dollars: It could be something like $50,000—making it prohibitively expensive to most copycats. Banks would love this. They would move their existing online banks under a more secure domain in no time.

The creation of a new domain for a specific industry is not unprecedented: We’ve already done it for museums, with their restricted ".museum" top-level domain.

The Premier League and a US company have sued You Tube for breaching its copyright, Associated Press reported.

The Premier League and publisher Bourne want damages and any profits there might be from whatever was shown online.

Football is a popular sport and involves 20 grown men running up and down what's called a "pitch" chasing something called a ball. AP said the case was filed in a New York city district court on Friday.

The body which is responsible for the encryption of the HD-DVD is incandescent with rage that millions of bloggers have published the software key that can break the technology's codes.

Speaking to the BBC, Michael Ayers, chair of the AACS business group said that bloggers had crossed the line by publishing the code number.

He said that that the outfit was looking at "legal and technical tools" to confront those who published the key.

Ironically, the publication of the key would have disappeared into the great hole that is the Interweb if the AACS had not used its considerable legal and technical tools to lean on Google and Digg.

But it does not seem that the AACS had learnt its lesson about taking on the combined might of the net. Ayers still seems to think that the best way was to shove the toothpaste back in the tube by using some "legal and technical" steps to prevent the circumvention of copy protection.

The latest ruling comes from a judge who already told the RIAA it needed to pay fees. Now he's reaffirmed the decision and explained it quite clearly to the RIAA. The quotes are absolutely worth reading at that link, as the judge highlights the fact that copyright isn't solely for the benefit of the content creator/owner, but for enriching the public domain, and that gives anyone accused of infringement strong defenses to their use of the content.

The judge also challenges a bunch of questionable or misleading claims by the RIAA, basically suggesting that the RIAA was assuming he wouldn't actually look into any of its claims.

Trying to trick a judge that way doesn't tend to end well. Also, rewriting history doesn't work well, as the judge points out the RIAA tried to do in claiming that it had offered the defendant a way to settle without paying anything.

There's a lot more like that in the decision, including the judge pretty much slapping the RIAA down for suggesting that it may have won the case anyway...

Literally 15 minutes after I posted Wayne Crookes sues Google, Wikipedia there was a knock on my door. It was a writ server telling me I, too, have been named in a Crookes lawsuit, alongside the Wikipedia Foundation, six anonymous people and an Arizona proxy service.

What did I do? I linked to an article Crookes says libels him.

Odds are that Patti Santangelo, the New York mother who was the first RIAA victim to make a determined stand against the Big 4, helped to no small extent by p2pnet readers who put their money where their mouths were, contributing thousands of dollars towards her legal costs, has won her battle to clear her name and show up the Big 4 for the bullies they are.

She and her lawyer, Jordan Glass, have signed and submitted a stipulation to dismiss with prejudice the case lodged against her by the RIAA, clearly taking their cue from the language of US federal district court judge Colleen McMahon's response to Glass's letter of March 31.

"I don't know how other parents are managing it without money. That's why the RIAA is picking on people without money, because people with money can beat them. But now that the other defendants have my case to refer to, maybe that will help them save money and have more power to win."

For years, the RIAA has been bullying all sorts of people with lawsuits over file sharing -- but the evidence they use has always been weak, at best. In the early years, before most people recognized this, they were forced to settle. But, more recently, lawyers have realized that pointing out how weak the evidence is will often make the RIAA turn and drop the case. They usually try to get out of paying legal fees, but even that's becoming more difficult. In the latest case (as usual, pointed out by Ray Beckerman) a strong letter pointing out all the problems with the RIAA's case has resulted in a very quick voluntary dismissal of the case.

A Suffolk Superior Court judge yesterday denied a request from Diebold Election Systems to block a bid by Massachusetts to buy electronic voting machines from Election Systems & Software Inc.

Diebold had filed a lawsuit against the commonwealth of Massachusetts on March 15 looking to invalidate the state's $9 million contract to buy handicapped-accessible AutoMark voting machines made by rival ES&S.

In announcing the selection of the AutoMark machines on March 5, Galvin stated: "After extensive testing and analysis for security, I have determined that the AutoMark terminal is the one that will best enable voters with disabilities to cast their ballots without the assistance of another person."