Law and Order

The squeaky while might get the grease, but it looks a profitable wheel gets a lawsuit. A Hong Kong firm is threatening to sue Apple for 12% of all profits from iTunes and iPod sales. It's much bigger than that, though.

Hong Kong's Pat-right claims the patent it holds on Internet User Identify Verification, US Patent number 6,665,797 granted December 16, 2003 covers any online financial transaction that requires a password for protection.

Three men prosecutors dubbed the "Robin Hoods of cyberspace" pleaded guilty Tuesday to putting millions of dollars worth of copyrighted computer games, movies and software on the Internet so that people around the world could make copies for free.

All three said they made no money on the scheme, and did it just for the sport of it.

Swedish authorities formally charged a 26-year-old Hungarian man with industrial espionage on Tuesday, charging him with hacking into the Sony Ericsson AB and Ericsson AB intranets. Csaba Richter told officials he hacked into the intranets hoping that Sony Ericsson or Ericsson would hire him when they saw his skills, Chief District Prosecutor Tomas Lindstrand said.

On Friday, Judge James Kleinberg delayed a final ruling on whether three Web sites can be classified as legitimate journalistic outlets and can claim protection under reporter shield laws, thereby avoiding subpoenas from Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Computer Inc. The company recently filed a complaint against the sites—PowerPage.org, AppleInsider and Think Secret—in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, California.

A judge dismissed a felony spamming conviction that had been called one of the first of its kind, saying he found no "rational basis" for the verdict and wondering if jurors were confused by technical evidence.

Ruling Tuesday, Judge Thomas D. Horne also said jurors may have gotten "lost" when navigating Virginia's new anti-spam law in the case of Jessica DeGroot. But Horne upheld the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, who prosecutors said led the operation from his Raleigh, North Carolina, area home.

A California law firm has slapped Dell with a class action lawsuit charging the computer giant with "systematically deceiving" its customers.

The suit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court on 14 February, seeks class action status in California and accuses Dell of "bait and switch" practices, false advertising, fraud and deceit in sales and advertising, and breach of contract. The law firm behind the suit, Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, publicised it on Wednesday.

A Cheektowaga teenager, a whiz kid on the computer, has been arrested in Los Angeles and accused of bombarding Internet users with more than a million spam e-mails.

Not only is the 18-year-old accused of computer hacking and violating federal spam laws, but he allegedly threatened to wreak more havoc on a California Internet company if it didn't give him exclusive marketing rights to its customers, federal authorities said.

A Louisiana man pleaded guilty this week to two federal felonies for tricking a handful of MSN TV users into running a malicious e-mail attachment that reprogrammed their set-top boxes to dial 9-1-1 emergency response.

In a plea agreement with prosecutors, David Jeansonne, 44, admitted to committing a computer attack that created a threat to public health or safety, and to damaging a protected computer and causing a least $5,000 in harm.

A 22-year-old from California has pleaded guilty to hacking into the US network of mobile phone operator T-Mobile.

Nicholas Lee Jacobsen was arrested in October on suspicion of accessing the personal information of potentially hundreds of T-Mobile customers.

Under the initial charges Jacobsen faced two felony charges. That will now be reduced to a single charge of intentional access to a protected computer and recklessly causing damage as part of his guilty plea. The hacker could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

In a victory for the Motion Picture Association of America, a US District Court judge in Texas has shut down BitTorrent site LokiTorrent.com and orded them to turn over their server logs to the MPAA's attorneys. As of now, visitors to the site are greeted with a friendly message from the MPAA. (Whether the message current LokiTorrent.com is part of the court order or an attempt on the part of the site's owner to curry favor with the MPAA is unclear.)