Law and Order

Popular YouTube user Michelle Phan is being sued for alleged copyright infringement on songs she has used in her videos, according to reports from the BBC. Ultra Records claims that Phan has used 50 of its songs in her YouTube posts and on her website illegally despite one of the label's own artists objecting to the legal action.

Phan's YouTube channel centers around using and buying makeup, and her videos are often backed by upbeat music with the artist credited in the video's description. Artists whom Phan has used in her videos include Kaskade, deadmau5, and Calvin Harris.

A Stockholm District Court judge ruled on Wednesday that the Swedish detention order against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, issued on allegations of sexual assault, will remain in force.

Assange had asked the District Court of Stockholm in late June to revoke the detention order, hoping that a revocation would get him closer to leaving the Ecuadorean embassy in the U.K., where has been holed up for over two years.

Mary Anne Grady-Flores, a 58-year-old Ithaca, NY grandmother of three, faces a one-year county jail sentence after being charged with second-degree criminal contempt. The punishment comes after her repeated participation in peaceful anti-drone protests at the Hancock Air Base in DeWitt, NY.

Christopher Wilson is a 22-year-old computer science student with Asperger's syndrome. He's also facing six months in prison for refusing to hand over the encryption keys to police during the course of an investigation.

An Australian teenager has accepted a caution from police rather than face hacking charges for discovering a vulnerability in the website of one of the country’s public transport authorities late last year.

Joshua Rogers of Melbourne accepted the caution, he told IDG News Service via email yesterday. He will not face charges, and the caution – an acknowledgement that he broke the law – will be expunged from his record in five years if he does not commit the same offense in that period.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is suing the National Security Agency (NSA) over government disclosure of security flaws that have been uncovered by the intelligence community.

A Donegal man has avoided a jail term for criminal damage to his ex-girlfriend’s Facebook page after he admitted posting an offensive “status update” on it.

The man (30) was acquitted by a jury last month of raping and falsely imprisoning the woman in her home on the same date.

Until the Brian Krebs movie hits the theaters, we'll have to make do with the arrest of a Ukrainian man suspected of being behind a plot to frame the award-winning security journalist for dealing heroin.

Krebs' exploits scarcely need to be scripted; they're already Hollywood popcorn-crunching seat-of-your pants, as you can glean from New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth's February 2014 profile:

Techdirt has been covering for a while how iiNet has doggedly fought attempts to make Australian ISPs liable for copyright infringement on their networks, and how Hollywood has been pressuring Australia's (relatively) new Attorney General into making that happen. The latest development, reported by Gizmodo Australia, is that KAFTA, the free trade agreement between Australia and South Korea, signed in April this year, mentions iiNet in the following section concerning its implementation (pdf):

US Circuit Judge Randall Rader, who was just weeks ago the top patent judge in the nation, has announced he will step down, following an admission that he made an ethical "lapse" when he sent an e-mail praising an attorney who appears frequently before his court.

From 2010 until two weeks ago, Rader served as Chief Judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent appeals and interprets most of the nation's patent laws. The Washington, DC-based court is frequently the final arbiter in some of the highest-stakes technology battles in the world.