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Submission + - Anti groping cell phone application a hit in Japan (gizmodiva.com)

Submitted by
Deepa
Deepa writes: "Did you just grope me? Shall we head to the police? That's the message women are flashing on their cell phones with a popular program designed to ward off wandering hands in Japan's congested commuter trains. The application flashes increasingly threatening messages in bold print on the phone's screen to show to the offender: "Excuse me, did you just grope me?" "Groping is a crime," and finally, "Shall we head to the police?" Users press an "Anger" icon in the program to progress to the next threat. A warning chime accompanies the messages."
Censorship

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Torrents Deleted

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: All of the torrents on thepiratebay.com have been deleted.
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Sues Usenet, Decries it as Napster, Kazaa (wired.com) 1

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "The Recording Industry Association of America is suing usenet.com, decrying it as the next Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer, illicit file-sharing sites.

"Defendant provides essentially the same functionality that P2P services such as Napster, Aimster, Grokster and Kazaa did (prior to being enjoined by the federal courts) — knowingly providing the site and facilities for users to upload and download copyrighted works — except that defendant goes further than even the P2P services to facilitate and encourage copyright infringement by its users," said the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. "Defendant customizes its service to make it as convenient and seamless as possible for subscribers to distribute and obtain copyrighted music without authorization and without paying for that music."

The suit, comes two weeks after the RIAA won its first pirating jury trial targeting an individual. A Duluth, Minnesota jury ordered Jammie Thomas to pay the RIAA $222,000 for pirating 24 songs on the Kazaa system in 2005."
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Conceals Overturned Case

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "When a "pro se" litigant (i.e. someone representing himself) lost a motion, and the Judge agreed with the RIAA's claim that "making available" was actionable under the Copyright Act, in Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA was quick to bring this "authority" to the attention of the judges in Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin, who were considering the same issue. When the pro se litigant made a motion for "reconsideration", and succeeded in getting the judge's decision overturned, they were not so quick, however, to inform those same judges of this new development. When the defendants' lawyers found out — a week after the RIAA's lawyers learned of it — they had to notify the judges themselves . At this moment we can only speculate as to what legal authorities they cited to the judge in Duluth, Minnesota, to get him to instruct the jurors that just "making available" was good enough."
Media

Submission + - The Pirate Bay files charges against big media

Submitted by PygmySurfer
PygmySurfer writes: The Pirate Bay has filed suit against several media companies:

"Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.

While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level."
The Courts

Submission + - Court decision may invalidate OSS licensing (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
athloi
athloi writes: "Jacobsen argued for the copyright claim, essentially, was that Katzer and Kamind violated copyrights on JMRI Project decoder definition files by reproducing and redistributing versions of the software without including the attribution required by the open source license utilized. The court held that Jacobsen had implicitly promised not to sue for copyright infringement by distributing the source code under a nonexclusive license. The license was subject to certain conditions — which the defendants may have violated — but any transgression was a breach of contract, not a copyright violation, according to the court. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/open_sourc e_railroad/"
Mozilla

Submission + - whyisfirefoxblocked.com cracked (whyisfirefoxblocked.com) 2

Submitted by Merk
Merk writes: On Friday there was an article about someone starting a campaign to block Firefox users. Their justification was that Firefox users were more likely to block ads, and that by blocking ads, they were thieves, stealing from website developers.

Well, sometime over the weekend the site was altered, presumably by someone cracking in. The text on the page now gives a Firefox fan's reasoning why someone might want to ban the browser. (Image of page, first seen on Digg)
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - DMCA lawsuit for circumventing coupon print limits

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: A Fremont, CA man (John Stottlemire) who claims that he was trying to show his skill in order to get a job at Coupons, inc. created a program and showed people how to delete the files and registry entries that limited the printing of coupons using software from coupons.com. He now faces a lawsuit, from Coupons, inc., alleging DMCA violations. The company alleges that his actions are equivalent to those of DeCSS creator "DVD Jon". Mr. Stottlemire asks how deleting files off one's own computer can be illegal, while some lawyers suggest that the DMCA is very broad and may apply in this case.
Security

Submission + - Facebook Source Code Leaked

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "We just received a tip that the source code for the Facebook main index page has been leaked and published on a blog called Facebook Secrets. There are only two possible ways that the source code got out — the first is that a Facebook developer has sent it out, or the more likely option that a security hole has been used on either one of the Facebook servers or in their source code repository to reveal the code....[ + ]"
Books

Submission + - Harry Potter and a Goblin's Take on Copyright (scienceaddiction.com)

Submitted by
DevanJedi
DevanJedi writes: "Here's a passage from page 517 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows : (Ron's brother Bill is warning Harry against trusting a goblin Griphook.) "You don't understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs. [...] They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. [...] They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft." These goblins sound like our friendly neighborhood MPAA/RIAA lawyers!"

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