So I've finally had the time to read through last week's 156-page ruling in "Association for Molecular Pathology v. US PTO", the case which challenged the patents held my Myriad Genetics on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast cancer genes. It's a delight to read, in that Judge Sweet clearly took great pains to understand the molecular biology involved ( Read more... )

So Joel Tenenbaum admitted he'd done all the file sharing the RIAA accused him of, and all the judge asked the jury to decide was the size of the monetary damage. They found him liable for a total of $675,000 for the 30 songs - kind of an arbitrary number, don't you think? Check out this observation passed on by David Post at the Volohk ( Read more... )

Long-time readers may recall the ongoing legal proceedings in Perfect 10 v Google, which I wrote about last year. This was the case in which a web site that sold nude photos sued Google for copyright infringement, because third-party web sites were violating P10's copyright of those images, and Google's image search indexed those third-party sites ( Read more... )

Man, this whole having-a-real-job thing interferes with your ability to read random supreme court decisions! Fortunately, there are still stretches where I simply have to wait an hour to see the results of an experiment ( Read more... )

Decision of the Day points to a recent appeals court verdict against a tax payer who was fighting a $784 IRS negligence penalty. Here is, I kid you not, a direct quote from the decision:A taxpayer is not required to be perfect for this would be an unrealistic expectation. Even tax specialists cannot be perfect. The Code is complex. Reasonable ( Read more... )

A California District Count has agreed with nude photo website Perfect 10 and will grant a preliminary injunction against Google's image search thumbnails of copyrighted images. The case and opinion (edit: better PDF) have lots of interesting stuff.

( Some subtle points... )

When the NSA warrantless wiretapping story broke, I publicly expressed the opinion that the leak surely must have come from someone in Congress (some of whom, you may recall, the president claimed to have briefed on the program many times, though that's been debated). There's just no way, I argued, that someone inside the NSA, that bastion of ( Read more... )

Item 1: You may have heard of the minor uproar about Blizzard, the company that runs the on-line game World of Warcraft, spying on players. Summary: there are third-party programs which let you "cheat" in various ways; while you run the WoW client software, it gathers some statistics on all other programs running on your PC and sends the info to ( Read more... )

Doubtless everyone will soon start screaming about the just-released district court case decision in favor of Michael Newdow, who is again challenging the appearance of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Last year, as you recall, the Supreme Court dodged the bullet, pointing out that he didn't have standing to sue on his daughter's behalf: ( Read more... )

Hooray! The First Circuit can tell a hawk from a handsaw. Yesterday, they handed down their decision in the appeal of United States v. Councilman, the big case about what the federal Wiretap Act means for email and similar electronic communications ( Read more... )