Law and Order

We already find the concept of "secondary liability" when it comes to copyright troubling enough. It's worrisome when a third party who had no direct involvement in the actual infringement can be blamed for it. Yet, in the legacy entertainment industry's insane infatuation with stopping all infringement, they keep going further up the chain, past secondary liability into tertiary or possibly even quaternary liability -- blaming those further and further removed from the actual infringement.

In 2012, French blogger, activist, and businessman Olivier Laurelli sat down at his computer. It automatically connected to his VPN on boot (he owns a small security services company, called Toonux, which was providing a connection via a Panamanian IP address) and began surfing the Web.

Innovatio IP Ventures has become arguably the most infamous sender of patent demand letters in recent memory, besides the $1,000-per-worker "scanner trolls" we covered last year. Innovatio bought old Broadcom patents and then sent out more than 13,000 letters asking for individual chain hotels and coffee-shops to pay between $2,300 and $5,000 in licensing fees, for using off-the-shelf Wi-Fi routers and other access points. When the company didn't get paid, lawsuits followed.

Ross Ulbricht, alleged creator of the online black market Silk Road, was indicted in New York Tuesday on narcotics, money laundering and so-called "kingpin" charges, and faces up to life in prison.

Authorities say Ulbricht created in 2011 the Silk Road, a site that was used to sell drugs including heroin and ecstasy, as well as hacking tools and other goods. He was arrested in October when federal agents picked him up in a San Francisco public library. Prosecutors say his pseudonyms included "Dread Pirate Roberts" and "DPR."

A group of hackers and a human rights organization are suing the German government for allegedly conducting illegal spying activities and aiding the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

 Here's comes another challenge to the constitutionality of the NSA's programs. The ACLU has joined defendant Jamshid Muhtorov in filing a motion that claims his Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the NSA's surveillance efforts and seeks to suppress the admission of that evidence.

The National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program received a highly charged constitutional challenge on Wednesday. This first-of-its-kind challenge comes via a motion filed by attorneys for Jamshid Muhtorov, an Uzbek refugee, Colorado resident, and accused terrorist, whose e-mail and possibly other communications were secretly gathered by the US government.

Muhtorov's motion not only sets up a likely court test of the constitutionality of government eavesdropping, but it could also be a signal of many more cases to come.

The U.S. last week brought charges against two Arkansas men for operating an e-mail hacking website, needapassword.com, which offered to obtain passwords to any e-mail account for a fee. The scheme, operated by Mark Anthony Townsend of Cedarville, Ark., and Joshua Alan Tabor of Prairie Grove, affected some 6,000 accounts, according to a Jan. 24 press release from the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Cedarville and Prairie Grove have a combined population of less than 6,000 people. Yet the investigation into the website stretched around the globe.

The alleged architect of the bank-hacking malware SpyEye, which is said to have infected 1.4 million computers, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud. The US Department of Justice announced Tuesday that Russian national Aleksandr Andreevich Panin was the primary developer and distributor of SpyEye.

A court in The Hague has ruled that local internet service providers (ISPs) can stop trying to block The Pirate Bay, because blocks are overbearing and do not work.

A ruling from the Dutch court (pdf) sees justice side with two ISPs that have baulked at implementing whackamole blocks and take a different view of the hard line pursued by local copyright cartel enforcer Brein.

Brein approached the courts in 2010 with a request that the ISP Ziggo put a wall around The Pirate Bay. Ziggo resisted the rightsholders' demand and was joined by another ISP called Xs4all.