Within the year, we could discover whether legal availability erases black market sales, and whether traffic accidents decrease as drinkers switch to marijuana, says Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "It will also be interesting to see if we get a noticeable decline in jail populations, as fewer people are arrested for illegally selling or using marijuana," he says.

We recently discovered that thanks to Sky’s Broadband Shield filtering system, TorrentFreak is now blocked on one of the UK’s largest ISPs by users who think they are protecting their kids.

We are not scared to let anyone have their say and we embrace free speech. But apparently the people at Sky and their technology masters at Symantec believe that we should be denied our right to communicate on the basis that we REPORT NEWS about file-sharing issues.

New research published by Tulane University Law Professor Glynn Lunney shows that online piracy is linked to the creation of more hit music.

Keeping in mind that copyright intends to promote “the Progress of Science” by encouraging the distribution and creation of new works, Professor Lunney can only conclude that sharing music without permission of the owner should be legal under copyright law.

On October 23, 2013 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued the proposed rules for Regulation Crowdfunding.

For raises under $100,000, the SEC estimates portal and compliance fees will eat up between 12.9% and 39% of the money raised.

If you are looking to raise money via crowdfunding, the moral of the story is, try to raise as close to the next threshold as possible.

Snapchat, a mobile photo-messaging app created for wiping out traces of the messages for privacy reasons, this week was hit with a major breach of its users' privacy that exposed names and phone numbers of some 4.6 million of its customers. The data dump came after security researchers published a proof-of-concept for a weakness associated with the "Find Friends" feature.

On Monday, Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley filed suit against Facebook with the Northern District Court of California. The men accuse Facebook of scanning private messages with URLs in them "for purposes including but not limited to data mining and user profiling." The suit asserts that this practice is a violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

"Representing to users that the content of Facebook messages is 'private' creates an especially profitable opportunity for Facebook, because users who believe they are communicating on a service free from surveillance are likely to reveal facts about themselves that they would not reveal had they known the content was being monitored," the plaintiffs said in their complaint.

France-based telecom firm Orange has revealed plans to take legal action against the US National Security Agency (NSA) for using its submarine cable for surveillance.

An Orange spokeswoman was quoted by Reuters as saying: "We will take legal action in the next few days because we want to know more about the eventuality that Orange data may have been intercepted.

An NSA program called DROPOUTJEEP allows the agency to intercept SMS messages, access contact lists, locate a phone using cell tower data, and even activate the device’s microphone and camera.

“Either [the NSA] have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products, meaning they are hoarding information about critical systems that American companies produce, and sabotaging them, or Apple sabotaged it themselves,” Appelbaum said at the Chaos Communication Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

The Kids Right to Read Project says it saw a striking increase in the number of books challenged or banned across the U.S. this year. Coordinator Acacia O'Connor told Shelf Awareness last week that the group investigated 53 percent more incidents in 2013 than 2012 — 49 cases in 29 states.

O'Connor added that many of the books challenged were written by minorities. "There are moments," she said, "when a half-dozen or so challenges regarding race or LGBT content hit within a couple weeks, where you just have to ask, 'What is going on out there?'"

According to a new Pew Research Center analysis, six-in-ten Americans (60%) say that “humans and other living things have evolved over time,” while a third (33%) reject the idea of evolution, saying that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

Roughly a quarter of adults (24%) say that “a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today,” while about a third (32%) say that evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection.”