Law and Order

The recording industry sued 477 more computer users Wednesday, including dozens of college students at schools in 11 states, accusing them of illegally sharing music across the Internet.

The Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the largest labels, praised efforts by colleges and universities to use technology and school policies to crack down on music piracy on their own computer networks. But it said the most egregious offenders on campus deserved to be sued.

The company that operates the Web site for music retailer Tower Records has settled complaints by U.S. regulators that it allowed hackers in 2002 to steal personal information about thousands of its online customers. Under the agreement announced Wednesday, MTS Inc. of West Sacramento, Calif., must maintain a "reasonably designed" program to assure the security of customers to the Web site and hire outside consultants every two years during the next decade to test its security.

The Federal Trade Commission said failure to abide by those terms could result in fines up to $11,000.

L33tdawg: On behalf of everyone here at HITB, we wish Adrian the best of luck as well, and our thoughts are always with him...

In a case defense attorneys called the first to test the limits of Internet free speech, a judge asked a court to drop her defamation lawsuit against someone who criticized her in an Internet chat room.

Judge Joan Orie Melvin no longer wants to know the identity of a critic who denounced her on the Internet in 1999, court documents filed in the past week show.

No reason was given for the decision. Melvin's attorney, Jack Orie, did not immediately return a call to his office Saturday.

A 37-year-old Buffalo man was convicted by a state court jury of illegally sending more than 825 million junk e-mail messages and using stolen identities to thwart attempts to stop him.

After a four-day trial, a jury found Howard H. Carmack guilty on Wednesday of 14 counts, including forgery, identity theft, falsifying business records and criminal possession of a forgery device.

Wayne C. Felle, Carmack's attorney, said the conviction will be appealed.

Vonage Holdings Corp. has sued AT&T Corp. for trademark infringement, alleging that the name of AT&T's newly launched VOIP service is confusingly similar to its company and product name. In its lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, Vonage alleges that AT&T is infringing on its name by launching a VOIP service named CallVantage. Vonage also is accusing AT&T of cyber squatting for having filed a series of domain names in February that it says are similar to those owned by Vonage.

The music industry, fighting an intense battle to stop a worldwide slide in sales, have unleashed its first wave of international lawsuits against Internet song-swappers.

Writs are being issued against 247 individuals in Italy, Germany, Denmark and Canada. The industry vowed more countries will be added to the dragnet in coming weeks.

Music trade group, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) alleges those targeted put hundreds, even thousands of tracks on Internet file-sharing services such as Kazaa and WinMX for others to download.

A former claims adjuster for a U.S. insurance company is the first to be charged under federal wiretap law for the covert use of a hardware keystroke logger, after he was caught using the device while secretly helping consumer attorneys gather information to use against his own company.

There's a new legal battle over Kazaa -- and this time it has nothing to do with swapping copyrighted music online.

A native of Romania is filing suit and he claims that he wrote the source code to the popular file-sharing software. In addition to seeking the rights to the software, Fabian Toader is seeking $25 million dollars in compensation. Toader claims he wrote the computer code for Kazaa in 2000 while working in Romania on a freelance basis for Kazaa. The company then sold the rights to the software in 2002 to Sharman Networks.

A California appeals court on Friday reversed a four-year-old order barring the publication of a DVD-cracking tool on the Internet, finding the injunction violated the defendant's free speech rights.

The case was closely watched as a test of how much protection companies can expect in California for trade secrets that become widely distributed online.