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Anti groping cell phone application a hit in Japan->

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."
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The Courts

RIAA Sues Usenet, Decries it as Napster, Kazaa-> 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."
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The Courts

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

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

Court decision may invalidate OSS licensing->

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/"
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A couple more shots of whiskey, women 'round here start looking good. [something about a 10 being a 4 after a six-pack? Ed.]