Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of the country's largest manufacturers of voting machines, is scheduled to argue in court today that the Office of the Secretary of State wrongly picked another company to supply thousands of voting machines for the disabled.

Weisberg said Diehold was so stunned it did not get the contract that it now believes "it's worth the time and money" of going to court to challenge the contract's award, even though the company at this stage has no hard evidence of unfair treatment.

"We want a judge to either order the contract awarded to Diebold, based on his review of the proposals, but if he does not want to go that far, to at least order a reopening of the competition," he said.

While price was a key consideration, other criteria were considered, such as the quality of machine, security, and service.

The latest target of the RIAA's ire is a 10-year-old girl in Oregon, who was 7 when the alleged infringement occurred, and whose disabled mother lives on Social Security. In Atlantic v. Andersen, an Oregon case that was widely reported in 2005 when the defendant counterclaimed against the RIAA under Oregon's RICO statute and other laws, the defendant's mother sought to limit the RIAA's deposition of the child to telephone or video-conference. The RIAA has refused, insisting on being able to grill the little girl in person.

The case of Elektra v. Santangelo has been one of the more closely followed cases in the RIAA's crusade against suspected file sharers, due in no small part to the aggressiveness of Patti Santangelo's defense. Ray Beckerman is reporting that Judge Colleen McMahon has denied the RIAA's motion to dismiss the case without prejudice, ruling that the case must either proceed to trial or be dismissed with prejudice.

It's a noteworthy ruling because if the case is dismissed with prejudice, Santangelo would be considered the prevailing party and would likely be entitled to an award of attorneys' fees, as in Capitol v. Foster.

The choice is clear-cut for the RIAA: either proceed with a full-blown jury trial in which they will have to convince a jury that the defendant is guilty of secondary infringement-making the same argument that the judge in Capitol v. Foster didn't buy-or agree to an order dismissing the action with prejudice.

Lately, the RIAA has been on a high-profile campaign to get college students that the RIAA believes have been involved in illegal file trading to settle lawsuits against them at a "discount". As part of this strategy, the company has tried to enlist universities to help them identify and turn over the names of offending students. But it's heartening to see that some universities aren't spinelessly acquiescing to the RIAA's demands. The University of Wisconsin has told the RIAA that it has no obligation to rat its students out unless it's compelled to do so by a subpoena. Meanwhile, the University of Nebraska has told the RIAA that it can't help them identify many of the students accused of file trading.

If there were any doubt that the university is really irritated by the RIAA's requests, it has requested that the RIAA pay the university to reimburse its expenses from dealing with this (good luck with that). If all of this back and forth sounds familiar, it's because it very closely resembles what happened a few years ago when the RIAA tried getting ISPs to share data on their users. Fortunately, the ISPs stood up for their users and told the RIAA to get lost. It's too bad the group didn't seem to learn its lesson.

Saddam Hussein's former deputy has been hanged for the killings of 148 Shias in 1982, an official with the Iraqi prime minister's office said.

Taha Yassin Ramadan was Saddam's vice president when the regime was ousted four years ago.

Along with Saddam himself, Ramadan is the fourth man to be executed over the killings of 148 Shias following a 1982 assassination attempt against the former leader in the city of Dujail.

The FBI has been illegally obtaining information on the US public, a report by the justice department's inspector general has said.

The FBI used the Patriot Act, passed after the 11 September 2001 attacks, to compel the release of information illegally or improperly, it said.

The 126-page report by inspector general Glenn Fine said in some cases agents had failed to get the proper authorisation to obtain personal data.

The report said national security letter requests had risen from 39,000 in 2003 to about 56,000 in 2004 before falling back to about 47,000 in 2005.

In a review of field office files, the report found that 22% of the cases it investigated contained one or more possible unreported or unidentified violations.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales praised the report and said he had told FBI director Robert Mueller past mistakes would "not be tolerated".

Music industry trade body the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) is seeking a contempt of court order against e-tailer CD Wow, after the company was accused by the BPI of continuing 'grey imports' of CDs from abroad.

The BPI is now seeking a finding that CD Wow is in contempt of Court; a fine payable to the crown by CD Wow; an order that CD Wow pay damages for breach of copyright; and an order that CD Wow pay the UK record industry's costs.

The etailer added it may face closure if it loses the battle with the BPI.

The legal wrangling between the two was initially concluded in 2004 when they reached an out-of-court settlement which saw pounds added to the price of CDs after CD Wow switched from sourcing its goods from Asia to Europe.

CD Wow suggested in emails to customers that the price rises were imposed on it, a claim the BPI refuted leading to an injunction preventing the CD seller from repeating the claims.

Over the weekend, a bunch of people stopped by to point us to the blog post from the maker of some blogging software who was surprised to note that the MPAA had started a blog using his software, but had stripped out all of the backlinks to the developers site -- despite it being pretty clear in the license that you could not do that. The story got picked up on a bunch of popular tech sites, leading the MPAA to take down the blog and proffer a weak defense that the blog (while on an unprotected site) was just for testing, had never been made public and was just a proof of concept. Someone from the MPAA insisted that the organization would have paid for a license to the software had the MPAA moved forward with the project. However, as the developer notes, if he used similar excuses to explain previewing a movie he downloaded, somehow he doubts the MPAA would find that acceptable. Of course, this isn't the first time we've seen the MPAA have a bit of a double standard when it comes to how it can ignore the intellectual property rules it claims to support so strongly. A year ago, remember, the MPAA was accused of making unauthorized copies of a movie criticizing the MPAA, This Film Is Not Yet Rated. That time MPAA officials claimed it was okay to make those unauthorized copies because it had "implications" for MPAA employees. Funny how the MPAA comes up with all sorts of exceptions for its own activities that aren't found anywhere in copyright law -- and yet it doesn't want to give anyone else the benefit of the doubt.

A blogger who wrote his own blogging engine called Forest Blog recently noticed that none other than the MPAA was using his work, and had completely violated his linkware license by removing all links back to the Forest Blog site, and had not credited him in any way.

Amazingly, the MPAA seem to think they're above "formalities" like licenses and such. The MPAA blog, located at www.mpaa.org/blog_default.asp, was using Patrick's Forest Blog software, but had been completely stripped of his name, and links back to his site. He only found about it accidentally when he happened to visit the MPAA site.

Clearly, there seems to be a lack of concern by the MPAA of others' copyrighted works. Therefore, is it unsurprising that their customers seem to have the same attitude towards their movies?

Teenagers taking risque photos of themselves are prosecuted for violating child pornography laws.

Combine unsupervised teenagers, digital cameras and e-mail, and, given sufficient time, you'll end up with risque photographs on a computer somewhere.

On March 25, 2004, Amber and Jeremy took digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in unspecified "sexual behavior." The two sent the photos from a computer at Amber's house to Jeremy's personal e-mail address. Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.

Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.

In other words, under Florida law, Amber and Jeremy would be legally permitted to engage in carnal relations, but they're criminals if they document it.

Wolf speculated that Amber and Jeremy could have ended up selling the photos to child pornographers ("one motive for revealing the photos is profit") or showing the images to their friends. He claimed that Amber had neither the "foresight or maturity" to make a reasonable estimation of the risks on her own. And he said that transferring the images from a digital camera to a PC created innumerable problems: "The two computers (can) be hacked."