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.

Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer continues to mislead the public about why Google keeps detailed logs on its customers searches and internet activity.

Google's policy is a complicated beast that keeps personally identifiable logs for all of its services globally 18 months, at which time Google attempts to anonymize the data by losing a few digits of the IP addresses of entries in the logs.

But let's reiterate: There is no United States or E.U. law that requires Google to keep detailed logs of what individuals search for and click on at Google's search engine. It's simply dishonest to continually imply otherwise in order to hide the real political and monetary reasons that Google chooses to hang onto this data.

Google is keeping the data because its engineers love mining the data and because holding onto the data makes law enforcement agencies happy. How often do law enforcement agents or lawyers in divorce cases show up at Google HQ with subpoenas?

For instance, it could stop issuing cookies to anonymous users that last for decades.

For instance on the user sign-up page, Google currently automatically enrolls users in to a system that records and analyzes everything they do on the Web, with zero explanation that the "feature" involves recording, in perpetuity, every url visited while logged into their Google account.

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.

A video posted to YouTube in April offers a primer on how to use Google to pilfer music and video files in less time than it takes to download them from a peer-to-peer service.

The how-to video focuses on what is known as an "index of" search and shows users how to direct Google's search engine to locate files from unprotected computer systems, many of which are found on college campuses. University students around the country often store music on their schools' computer networks.

Ruska's formula also worked at Yahoo and other search engines, according to the FT. Record labels have always maintained that downloading unauthorized music files violates copyright law.

According to security vendor BitDefender, spammers have defeated a system designed to differentiate humans from machines when registering new accounts online. Known as Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), the system won't allow users to advance until distorted characters in a box are correctly entered. BitDefender says a new threat, Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, is using more than 15,000 automatically generated bogus Microsoft Hotmail accounts to spread, and is registering 500 new accounts per hour, suggesting the Captcha system has been defeated.

The performers, normally duos, mainly covered songs written and made famous by other musicians. There was no cover charge, no pay for the musicians, no limit to how long patrons could sit on a couch with their coffee, playing chess and enjoying the music.

Then a few months later, music industry giant ASCAP started calling and sending letters saying East Coast Coffee & Tea was in violation of copyright laws. The fee to continue the music was $400 a year.

Six months later, other music copyright companies began calling the Halls and demanding money. Most days there would be three or four phone calls from each company, Hall said.

When a songwriter signs with one of the licensing companies -- the country's three biggest are BMI, SESAC and ASCAP -- his or her music is copyrighted.

"It started 15 years ago when I had a guy come out to our other place, Cantina dos Amigos, and play Mexican music on his guitar on the patio," Andrus said. "They came after me for money. Are they really sending royalty checks to the songwriter in Mexico?"

Nearly 2,000 officials in central China's Hunan province have been caught breaking China's strict one-child policy, state media reported Sunday.

Xinhua said the officials were caught between 2000 and 2005 by the provincial family planning commission and included 21 national and local lawmakers and 24 political advisers.

China has about 1.3 billion people, 20 percent of the world's total. The government has pledged to keep the population under 1.36 billion in 2010, and under 1.45 billion in 2020.

But rising incomes mean some newly rich can afford to break the rules and pay resulting fines. In April, the government said it would crack down on rich lawbreakers with bigger fines.

The Swedish Police just can't seem to leave The Pirate Bay at bay. It's been a year and two months since the worlds largest torrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, was originally raided and shut down by police, and now they're at it again, but with claims of child pornography. Brokep, over at The Pirate Bay (TPB), got a 'heads up' from a friend that the Swedish Police are going to put the site on its porn filter blacklist; this means anyone who tries to access the site from Sweden will get redirected to another site with a message explaining that they are not allowed to visit child pornography sites.

The University of Berlin, with partners Budapest University of Technology and Economics and Universita Politecnica delle Marche in Italy, has managed to work out how to store 500GB of data on a regular HD DVD or Blu-ray disc.

The Microholas project developed a microholographic recording technique, using nanostructures inside the disk rather than on the surface as in conventional optical storage systems.

By applying wavelength multiplexing techniques to multi-layer disc structures, very high storage densities can be achieved, Professor Susanna Orlic told German site Pressetext. The 500GB prototype has 50 data-storage layers.

Orl said the technology has the potential to store one terabyte (1TB) of data.

The site, MiiVi.com, complete with a user registration, forum, and "family filter", offers complete downloads of movies and "fast and easy video downloading all in one great site." But that's not all; MiiVi also offers client software to speed up the downloading process. The only catch is, after it's installed, it searches your computer for other copyrighted files and reports back.

ZeroPaid, acting on a tip from The Pirate Bay, found MiiVi to be registered to Media Defender using a whois search. Shortly after, the registrar information was changed, but the address still reflects Media Defender's address at 2461 Santa Monica Blvd., D-520 Santa Monica, CA 90404.

Not 10 hours after the site was found to be registered to Media Defender, the site went dead.