Instead, the controversial post-9/11 law would be expanded to give the FBI new powers to demand documents from companies without a judge's approval, according to a vote late Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence committee.

But the proposal appears to grant the FBI more power to seek information from banks, hospitals, libraries, and so on through "administrative subpoenas" without prior judicial oversight. The subpoenas are only supposed to be used for terrorism or clandestine intelligence cases.

One other detail: the FBI may designate that the subpoenas are secret and punish disclosure of their existence with up to one year in prison (and five years if the disclosure is deemed to "obstruct an investigation.")

In testimony in April, FBI director Robert Mueller said: "The administrative subpoena power would be a valuable complement to (existing) tools and provide added efficiency to the FBI's ability to investigate and disrupt terrorism operations and our intelligence gathering efforts."

Michael Speck, a representative of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, told a federal court hearing on Tuesday that the antipiracy unit had been "tailing" Nikki Hemming's premises on a "continuous basis" for several months until 11 a.m. on May 24.

"She personally wasn't a subject, rather the premises associated with her were. Conducting an investigation into a shadowy organization hiding behind a veil of secrecy and surveillance is a normal practice," he said.

"Given the nature of Kazaa, we conducted a range of investigations aimed at getting to the bottom of who controlled Kazaa. We stopped the surveillance when we confirmed her new address. We're not conducting any surveillance at present," he said.

Officials in California have notionally approved a bill to ban the sale of violent video games to kids.

Retailers selling or renting games deemed violent to under seventeens could be fined $1000 under the proposed legislation.

Proponent of the bill, Leland Yee a child psychologist, said youngsters shouldn’t be allowed to "go to stores and buy video games that teach them to do the very things we put people in jail for."

The bill didn’t get past a committee stage earlier this week, but was rubber stamped by the arts committee at a second attempt. It will now be considered by the full Assembly before ending up with the State Senate.

The US movie industry has made good its promise to name Brits Kevin Reid and Ian Hawthorne in its legal action against the users of their bds-palace.co.uk website, which links to BitTorrent-hosted content.

Last month, Reid formally received a summons to appear before the US District Court of New Jersey, where MPAA members Paramount, Warner, Universal and 20th Century Fox are attempting to identify and therefore sue individuals they alleged shared their film and TV content without authorisation.

US law does not reach as far as the UK, and even if the US Court views Reid and Hawthorne's refusal to answer the summons in a harsh light, there's little it can do about it. Should the two Brits visit New Jersey, they might possibly run into trouble, but they may well be free to visit other states of the Union safe from harassment from Motion Picture Ass. of America-member lawyers.

Reid claims Oppenheim "made it quite clear that he felt that if our Prime Minister could be persuaded to back his country in the Gulf War, then there was no doubting that American law would prevail in the UK". Fortunately, our courts tend to be a little less in awe of our transatlantic cousins than our glorious leader does.

Still, Hollywood's lawyers must come to the UK, either to persuade an English High Court judge that any ruling on the evidence made in the US should apply here too, or to challenge Reid and Hawthorne under UK copyright law, which in some respects is less liberal than its US equivalent.

The RIAA's questionable math has been discussed at length in the past -- where they love to trot out the claim that each shared song is worth somewhere between $750 and $30,000 in "losses." While the number is completely bogus for a variety of reasons, it is the number that the industry uses when suing the thousands of people they've sued. Now, Declan McCullough points out an analysis suggesting that these high dollar claims are unconstitutional by being so excessive. Because of this, the writer argues, the RIAA should not be allowed to sue for such a high amount. This would mean that more accused file sharers would likely be willing to challenge the lawsuits in court, rather than settling for a few grand just to get out from under the possibility of owing millions. In other words, some of these cases might actually get argued on the merits -- something the RIAA doesn't seem all that enthusiastic about, despite being the one bringing all of the lawsuits.

A French appeal court just issued a ruling preventing the inclusion of anti-copying measure on DVD. This is after a man who was not able to copy a DVD he purchase to a VHS cassette so he can watch it at his mother's place. Which is considered private copying and is a consumer right in France. He got the help of a consumer protection group to sue the Film Studio that produced the DVD. Film studios have one month to unprotect DVDs (I assume it is not for DVD that you already own).

Two NYPD veterans are being investigated by Internal Affairs for allegedly accepting payoffs from the motion-picture industry to arrest vendors of pirated DVDs, law-enforcement sources told The Post.

Often they would act on tips from investigators with the Motion Picture Association of America, many of whom are former cops, sources said.

There is nothing improper about that practice. But on at least four occasions in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island, the task force officers arrested the vendors, confiscated the illegal movies and then allegedly received gratuities of several hundred dollars from the MPAA itself or its investigators, the source said.

File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, under a bill that's slated to become the most dramatic expansion of online piracy penalties in years.

The bill, approved by Congress on Tuesday, is written so broadly it could make a federal felon of anyone who has even one copy of a film, software program or music file in a shared folder and should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released. Stiff fines of up to $250,000 can also be levied. Penalties would apply regardless of whether any downloading took place.

If signed into law, as expected, the bill would significantly lower the bar for online copyright prosecutions. Current law sanctions criminal penalties of up to three years in prison for "the reproduction or distribution of 10 or more copies or phonorecords of one or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of $2,500 or more."

Among the many clueless things the recording industry has done over the past few years is freak out over people daring to (oh my!) put lyrics online. We've written about a few cases where lyrics sites were forced to shut down due to angry recording industry lawyers, who somehow seem to think that putting up lyrics that make it easier for music fans to enjoy songs is damaging to the industry. It appears that this is still happening, as a bunch of lyrics sites in Germany are being threatened by the recording industry for writing out the lyrics of various songs. It would be interesting to see exactly how the industry thinks they're losing money by having people write out song lyrics online.

An Internet chat room monitor hired to keep children safe from sexual predators seduced a California girl online and was about to meet her for sex when he was found out by a co-worker, a lawsuit charges.

According to documents filed April 1 in Los Angeles Superior Court, the online relationship began when the girl was 15. She met the AOL employee in a children's chat room and confided in him about her parents' divorce and her troubles making friends.

They were preparing to meet on the girl's 17th birthday when one of the monitor's co-workers became suspicious and prevented the encounter.

America Online spokesman Nicholas Graham said the company fired the monitor and contacted authorities after learning of the situation in April 2003. The man, who was 23 when he met the girl online, has not been charged with a crime.

The suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages of more than $25,000 but does not give a specific dollar amount.