A US court has ruled (PDF) that "gig" economy giants including Uber and Lyft can continue treating their workers as independent contractors in the state of California. The BBC reports: The California appeals court found that a labor measure, known as Proposition 22, was largely constitutional. Labour groups and some workers had opposed the measure, saying it robbed them of rights like sick leave. The firms say the proposition protects other benefits such as flexibility.

The latest ruling overturns a decision made by a lower court in California in 2021, which found that Proposition 22 affected lawmakers' powers to set standards at the workplace. The state of California and a group representing Uber, Lyft and other firms appealed against the decision. On Monday, a three-judge panel at the appeals court ruled that workers could be treated as independent contractors. However it removed a clause, which put restrictions on collective bargaining by workers, from Proposition 22.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from STAT News: Health insurance companies have rejected medical claims for as long as they've been around. But a STAT investigation found artificial intelligence is now driving their denials to new heights in Medicare Advantage, the taxpayer-funded alternative to traditional Medicare that covers more than 31 million people. Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an older patient's treatment. The denials that follow are setting off heated disputes between doctors and insurers, often delaying treatment of seriously ill patients who are neither aware of the algorithms, nor able to question their calculations. Older people who spent their lives paying into Medicare, and are now facing amputation, fast-spreading cancers, and other devastating diagnoses, are left to either pay for their care themselves or get by without it. If they disagree, they can file an appeal, and spend months trying to recover their costs, even if they don't recover from their illnesses.

The algorithms sit at the beginning of the process, promising to deliver personalized care and better outcomes. But patient advocates said in many cases they do the exact opposite -- spitting out recommendations that fail to adjust for a patient's individual circumstances and conflict with basic rules on what Medicare plans must cover. "While the firms say [the algorithm] is suggestive, it ends up being a hard-and-fast rule that the plan or the care management firms really try to follow," said David Lipschutz, associate director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit group that has reviewed such denials for more than two years in its work with Medicare patients. "There's no deviation from it, no accounting for changes in condition, no accounting for situations in which a person could use more care."

STAT's investigation revealed these tools are becoming increasingly influential in decisions about patient care and coverage. The investigation is based on a review of hundreds of pages of federal records, court filings, and confidential corporate documents, as well as interviews with physicians, insurance executives, policy experts, lawyers, patient advocates, and family members of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries. It found that, for all of AI's power to crunch data, insurers with huge financial interests are leveraging it to help make life-altering decisions with little independent oversight. AI models used by physicians to detect diseases such as cancer, or suggest the most effective treatment, are evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. But tools used by insurers in deciding whether those treatments should be paid for are not subjected to the same scrutiny, even though they also influence the care of the nation's sickest patients.

The U.S. Justice Department is probing last year's collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin, raising the possibility of criminal charges being filed against the stablecoin's creator, Do Kwon, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter. CoinDesk reports: The FBI and the Southern District of New York have interviewed former employees of Terraform Labs, the company behind TerraUSD, and sought to interview others, according to the Journal. Manhattan federal prosecutors are also examining chat-group discussions among prominent trading firms Jump Trading Group, Jane Street Group and failed FTX affiliate Alameda Research involving a potential bailout of TerraUSD, according to a separate report from Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Such a bailout never took place, but the investigation is seeking to determine whether the firms were involved in possible market manipulation. TerraUSD and its sister token, Luna, both eventually collapsed, setting off a series of high-profile failures of prominent crypto firms, including hedge fund Three Arrows capital, Voyager Digital and FTX. The Department of Justice previously alleged that an unnamed crypto firm -- believed to be Jump -- had bailed out TerraUSD once before, in an indictment against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. In February, the SEC filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Kwon and Terraform Labs, accusing them of misleading investors about TerraUSD's risks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In January, a month before Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was released in theaters, a link to a leaked script was posted on the Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit. Last Friday, a Marvel Studios affiliate filed DMCA subpoena applications to compel Reddit and Google to expose the leakers. One named user account is shared among the subreddit's moderator team. Court documents indicate the plan is to force Reddit to expose them all. [...]

When information about the script/subtitle file was posted on Reddit mid-January, leak-loving Marvel fans were both excited and impressed. "Yeah this is some next level leak" and "This legit might be the biggest leak in this subs history" set the tone, but the fun didn't last. A moderator of the subreddit commented that since the information was receiving copyright notices, any "future sharing of the material will result in a ban." The thread is still live today and there's no doubt that Marvel is aware of it.

The DMCA subpoena application specifically mentions the thread alongside an email from Reddit's legal team, which had previously agreed to take the infringing content down. In common with the takedown notice sent to Google, the allegedly infringing content may have been deleted before Reddit could remove it. There's no mention of a copyright complaint, instead the post notes, "Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it." At this point concern shifts to the rest of the thread, which talks about the document hosted by Google and how the mod team "took the google doc down" to ensure that existing links to the file would no longer lead to it. As a result, Marvel now wants Reddit to hand over "All Identifying Information for the user 'u/MSSmods'," which throws another unpredictable element into the mix. The DMCA subpoena applications can be found here (G1/G2, R1/R2)

Dish Network must pay $469 million for infringing two patents held by parental-control technology maker ClearPlay related to filtering material from streaming video, a jury in U.S. federal court in Utah has decided. From a report: The jury in Salt Lake City reached its decision on Friday in ClearPlay's lawsuit against Dish, finding that Dish's AutoHop feature for skipping commercials on its Hopper set-top boxes is covered by ClearPlay's patents. While jurors found that Dish's technology violated ClearPlay's patent rights, they rejected ClearPlay's contention that Dish copied its technology intentionally. A Dish spokesperson said on Monday that the company was disappointed in the jury's decision and will contest the verdict, potentially through an appeal. Representatives for ClearPlay did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

DoNotPay, which describes itself as "the world's first robot lawyer," has been accused of practicing law without a license. From a report: It's facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by Chicago-based law firm Edelson on March 3 and published Thursday on the website of the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of San Francisco. The complaint argues: "Unfortunately for its customers, DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm. DoNotPay does not have a law degree, is not barred in any jurisdiction, and is not supervised by any lawyer." The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Jonathan Faridian, who said he'd used DoNotPay to draft various legal documents including demand letters, a small claims court filing, and a job discrimination complaint.

Per the complaint, Faridian believed he'd purchased legal documents "from a lawyer that was competent to provide them," but got "substandard" results. DoNotPay claims to use artificial intelligence to help customers handle an array of legal services without needing to hire a lawyer. It was founded in 2015 as an app to help customers fight parking tickets, but has since expanded its services. DoNotPay's website claims that it can help customers fight corporations, beat bureaucracy, find hidden money, and "sue anyone." DoNotPay told Insider: "DoNotPay respectfully denies the false allegations." It added: "We will defend ourselves vigorously."

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged for the first time that it purchased US location data rather than obtaining a warrant. Wired reports: While the practice of buying people's location data has grown increasingly common since the US Supreme Court reined in the government's ability to warrantlessly track Americans' phones nearly five years ago, the FBI had not previously revealed ever making such purchases. The disclosure came [Wednesday] during a US Senate hearing on global threats attended by five of the nation's intelligence chiefs.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, put the question of the bureau's use of commercial data to its director, Christopher Wray: "Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?" Wray said his agency was not currently doing so, but he acknowledged that it had in the past. He also limited his response to data companies gathered specifically for advertising purposes. To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising," Wray said. "I understand that we previously -- as in the past -- purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that's not been active for some time." He added that the bureau now relies on a "court-authorized process" to obtain location data from companies."

It's not immediately clear whether Wray was referring to a warrant -- that is, an order signed by a judge who is reasonably convinced that a crime has occurred -- or another legal device. Nor did Wray indicate what motivated the FBI to end the practice. In its landmark Carpenter v. United States decision, the Supreme Court held that government agencies accessing historical location data without a warrant were violating the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches. But the ruling was narrowly construed. Privacy advocates say the decision left open a glaring loophole that allows the government to simply purchase whatever it cannot otherwise legally obtain. [...] Asked during the Senate hearing whether the FBI would pick up the practice of purchasing location data again, Wray replied: "We have no plans to change that, at the current time."

The Federal Trade Commission has voted to sue to block Intercontinental Exchange from completing its $11.7 billion acquisition of mortgage software provider Black Knight. From a report: The antitrust agency said the deal would lead to higher prices for software that lenders use to generate mortgages. Higher prices would be passed on to home buyers, the FTC said. The FTC's lawsuit, filed in its administrative court, is a setback for Intercontinental Exchange's efforts to become a big player in the technical infrastructure behind home loans. Best known as the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, the company has increasingly pushed to digitize the mortgage business and made a series of deals to expand its role in home-loan finance.

Intercontinental Exchange -- known as ICE for short -- said it strongly disagreed with the FTC's decision. "ICE is fully confident in our position and look forward to presenting it in court," the company said in a statement. ICE and Black Knight currently compete to offer loan-origination systems -- used by lenders to initiate mortgage loans. Earlier this week, ICE said it had agreed to divest Black Knight's loan-origination system business to address any concerns about the deal hurting competition. The divestment would reduce the price tag of ICE's acquisition of Black Knight to $11.7 billion, from the original $13.1 billion when the deal was unveiled in May of last year. The FTC said it didn't believe that selling off Black Knight's product would fix the competitive harm caused by combining the two largest mortgage-loan technology providers. The agency also claimed the deal would undermine competition for another service that ICE and Black Knight provide that helps lenders get the best interest rates for home buyers.

A YouTube star who built a sizable following with slickly produced videos flaunting his fleet of luxury and sports cars, collection of diamond-encrusted bling, and his spacious Swedesboro home will be forced to give up nearly all of it after he was sentenced Tuesday to 5 and a half years in prison for the illegal business that allowed him to amass those trappings of success. From a report: Bill Omar Carrasquillo -- better known to his more than 800,000 online followers as "Omi in a Hellcat" -- pleaded guilty last year to running one of the most brazen and successful cable TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by the U.S. government. As part of his sentencing Tuesday, he was ordered to forfeit more than $30 million in assets, including nearly $6 million in cash; cars including Lamborghinis, Porsches, Bentleys, and McLarens; and a portfolio of more than a dozen properties he'd amassed across Philadelphia and its suburbs.

"Thirty million dollars is a lot of money [but] tangible objects aren't everything," U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III said in announcing the punishment during a hearing in federal court. "You have a large following and there may be people who think if you can get away with it, they can too." Carrasquillo, 36, apologized to his family, his employees, and the cable companies he'd cheated through his business, which illegally sold content hijacked from cable boxes to thousands of online subscribers paying fees as low as $15 a month. "I really didn't know the significance of this crime until I was picked up [by the FBI] at my home," he said. "I feel like I let everybody down." But while prosecutors described Carrasquillo's crimes -- which included counts of conspiracy, copyright infringement, fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion -- as serious, much of Tuesday's hearing focused on Carrasquillo's remarkable rags-to-riches story.

The domain name registrar Freenom, whose free domain names have long been a draw for spammers and phishers, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. KrebsOnSecurity reports: Freenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called "country code top level domains" (ccTLDs), including .cf for the Central African Republic; .ga for Gabon; .gq for Equatorial Guinea; .ml for Mali; and .tk for Tokelau. Freenom has always waived the registration fees for domains in these country-code domains, presumably as a way to encourage users to pay for related services, such as registering a .com or .net domain, for which Freenom does charge a fee. On March 3, 2023, social media giant Meta sued Freenom in a Northern California court, alleging cybersquatting violations and trademark infringement. The lawsuit also seeks information about the identities of 20 different "John Does" -- Freenom customers that Meta says have been particularly active in phishing attacks against Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users. The lawsuit points to a 2021 study (PDF) on the abuse of domains conducted for the European Commission, which discovered that those ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up five of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.

"The five ccTLDs to which Freenom provides its services are the TLDs of choice for cybercriminals because Freenom provides free domain name registration services and shields its customers' identity, even after being presented with evidence that the domain names are being used for illegal purposes," the complaint charges. "Even after receiving notices of infringement or phishing by its customers, Freenom continues to license new infringing domain names to those same customers." Freenom has not yet responded to requests for comment. But attempts to register a domain through the company's website as of publication time generated an error message that reads: "Because of technical issues the Freenom application for new registrations is temporarily out-of-order. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience. We are working on a solution and hope to resume operations shortly. Thank you for your understanding." Although Freenom is based in The Netherlands, some of its other sister companies named as defendants in the lawsuit names are incorporated in the United States.

It remains unclear why Freenom has stopped allowing domain registration, but it could be that the company was recently the subject of some kind of disciplinary action by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit entity which oversees the domain registrars. In June 2015, ICANN suspended Freenom's ability to create new domain names or initiate inbound transfers of domain names for 90 days. According to Meta, the suspension was premised on ICANN's determination that Freenom "has engaged in a pattern and practice of trafficking in or use of domain names identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark of a third party in which the Registered Name Holder has no rights or legitimate interest."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The US can stop Twitter from releasing details about the government's demands for user information in national security investigations, a court ruled (PDF), in the same week House Republicans are to grill national security officials over surveillance. Twitter had protested the government's redactions to a 2014 "transparency report" that featured a numerical breakdown of national security-related data requests from the previous year. The US appeals court in San Francisco on Monday agreed with a lower-court judge that the Justice Department had shown a "compelling" interest in keeping that information secret. Based on classified and unclassified declarations provided by government officials, the court was "able to appreciate why Twitter's proposed disclosure would risk making our foreign adversaries aware of what is being surveilled and what is not being surveilled -- if anything at all," US Circuit Judge Daniel Bress wrote for the three-judge panel.

Although the case is almost a decade old, the ruling comes just as lawmakers and US national security agencies gear up for a bruising fight over making changes to a key surveillance program. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, described by intelligence officials as a key authority, expires on Dec. 31 unless Congress votes to renew it. US agencies use the authority to compel internet and technology companies to turn over information about suspected foreign terrorists and spies. Changes to Section 702 could include altering what companies like Twitter are required to do in response to government demands. "The case at issue in Monday's decision involved efforts by Twitter to share information about two types of federal law enforcement demands on the social media company: 'national security letters' for subscriber information, which would cover metadata but not the substance of any electronic communications, and orders under FISA, which could include content," adds Bloomberg.

Judge Daniel Bress wrote: "The government may not fend off every First Amendment challenge by invoking national security. But we must apply the First Amendment with due regard for the government's compelling interest in securing the safety of our country and its people."

"On March 7, 2003, a struggling company called The SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM," writes LWN.net, "claiming that the success of Linux was the result of a theft of SCO's technology..."

Two decades later, "It is hard to overestimate how much the community we find ourselves in now was shaped by a ridiculous lawsuit 20 years ago...." It was the claim of access to Unix code that was the most threatening allegation for the Linux community. SCO made it clear that, in its opinion, Linux was stolen property: "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts". To rectify this "misappropriation", SCO was asking for a judgment of at least $1 billion, later increased to $5 billion. As the suit dragged on, SCO also started suing Linux users as it tried to collect a tax for use of the system.

Though this has never been proven, it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. To SCO's management, it may well have seemed like a good idea at the time. IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort. So the company, instead, directed its not inconsiderable legal resources to squashing this attack. But notably, so did the development community as a whole, as did much of the rest of the technology industry.

Over the course of the following years — far too many years — SCO's case fell to pieces. The "misappropriated" technology wasn't there. Due to what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry history, it turned out that SCO didn't even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over. The level of buffoonery was high from the beginning and got worse; the company lost at every turn and eventually collapsed into bankruptcy.... Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. Magazines like Forbes were warning the "Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement" that they "should wake up". SCO was suggesting a license fee of $1,399 — per-CPU — to run Linux.... Such an effort, in less incompetent hands, could easily have damaged Linux badly.

As it went, SCO, despite its best efforts, instead succeeded in improving the position of Linux — in development, legal, and economic terms — considerably.
The article argues SCO's lawsuit ultimately proved that Linux didn't contain copyrighted code "in a far more convincing way than anybody else could have." (And the provenance of all Linux code contributions are now carefully documented.) The case also proved the need for lawyers to vigorously defend the rights of open source programmers. And most of all, it revealed the Linux community was widespread and committed.

And "Twenty years later, it is fair to say that Linux is doing a little better than The SCO Group. Its swaggering leader, who thought to make his fortune by taxing Linux, filed for personal bankruptcy in 2020."

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried "has been under house arrest at his parents' home on the Stanford campus since December," writes the Washington Post, "making the elite university the unlikely host to one of America's most notorious alleged white-collar criminals.

"Surrounded by student co-ops, fraternity houses and other faculty homes, he's the talk of the neighborhood." Bankman-Fried, the son of two Stanford law professors, was released on a $250 million bond secured by the Craftsman-style house. While awaiting his fraud trial later this year, Bankman-Fried wears an ankle bracelet to track his movements and plays with his new dog, Sandor, according to a Puck News report.... It remains to be seen what consequences Bankman-Fried, who pleaded "not guilty," might face. So far, his ability to be detained at home, instead of held in prison, is an exception to how most federal defendants are treated. The quiet, traffic-light Stanford neighborhood is quite the upgrade from Fox Hill, a notoriously rough prison in the Bahamas where Bankman-Fried was briefly held before being extradited.

If Bankman-Fried violates the terms of his bail agreement, his parents could lose their house, which they've owned since 1991 and is worth over $3.5 million, according to public property records....

The U.S. government has tried to restrict his access to virtual private networks and certain apps where messages disappear, but a final ruling has not been made. The judge presiding over his case asked in a hearing last month, "Why am I being asked to turn him loose in this garden of electronic devices?," highlighting that despite any restrictions the court might place on Bankman-Fried's use of technology, he remains in a home with his parents who also have a plethora of ways to be wired. On Friday, prosecutors proposed limiting Bankman-Fried to a flip-phone or "non-smartphone" that cannot access the internet, and that he be issued a new laptop "with limited functionalities." Prosecutors also want to place strict limits and monitoring tools on his parents' devices.
But meanwhile, among the student population, "There are party fliers with his likeness. He's a punchline in campus comedy sketches. Students ride their bikes by on dates.... When asked whether they could confirm a rumor that a nearby student co-op had attacked the Bankman-Fried home with eggs, Stanford campus police did not respond."

And one freshman/cryptocurrency enthusiast even stole a sign from in front of Bankman-Fried's house, then "paraded it around for selfies at a cryptocurrency networking event. The sign is currently growing mold in his dorm-room closet." Bankman-Fried, who grew up on campus, "certainly fits into what I regard as the kind of culture of Stanford," says Richard White, a retired Stanford history professor — even if the 30-year-old former billionaire left Silicon Valley to attend MIT. White and others characterize Stanford's culture as a place where faculty and students are emboldened to take big risks in conceiving the next hot start-up or breakthrough innovation, often with easy access to capital, the conviction that they're changing the world — and few consequences if things go south.
"Through his spokesman Mark Botnick, Bankman-Fried declined to comment for this article...."

The BBC reports: Journalists have been forced to temporarily take down articles critical of powerful oil lobbyists due to the exploitation of US copyright law, according to a new report.

At least five such articles have been subject to fake copyright claims, including one by the respected South African newspaper Mail & Guardian, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The claims — which falsely assert ownership of the stories — have been made by mystery individuals under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law meant to protect copyright holders. Just last month, three separate false copyright claims were made against Diario Rombe, an investigative news outlet that focusses on Equatorial Guinea. The articles under attack are about the president of Equatorial Guinea's son, Gabriel Mbaga Obiang Lima, and his close associate, Cameroonian businessman and lawyer NJ Ayuk.

The OCCRP claimed in a report published on Wednesday that the DMCA process was often abused by "unknown parties" who create backdated fake articles to target critical news reports....

Climate Home editor Megan Darby told the OCCRP: "These bogus allegations look like a devious tactic to suppress independent journalism."
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the story.

Urban scooter company Lime sued Hertz Corp on Thursday alleging unfair competition and accusing the rental car giant of improperly hiring the startup's senior engineers. Reuters reports: San Francisco-based Neutron Holdings Inc, which does business as Lime, filed the lawsuit (PDF) in California federal court seeking unspecified monetary damages and an injunction "to recover and protect its trade secrets." It also named Charlie Fang, who previously was Lime's head of engineering, and another engineer as defendants. Lime claimed that Fang, who joined Hertz last year as a senior vice president, violated his employment agreement to not solicit former colleagues after leaving the company.

Hertz said in a statement it "vehemently disagrees with the claims made in the lawsuit." The loss of engineers has "significantly harmed" Lime, which provides short-term e-bike and scooter rentals in about 30 countries. The company said in the lawsuit it now faces "staff shortages, recruiting costs, and critical project delays." Hertz sought to "capitalize" on Fang and his team's knowledge of building "back-end infrastructure for ride-sharing and consumer facing apps so that it could gain a competitive advantage over other companies," according to the complaint.

A proposed law in Florida would force bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis and other elected officials to register with a state office and file monthly reports or face fines of $25 per day. The bill was filed in the Florida Senate Tuesday by Senator Jason Brodeur, a Republican. From a report If enacted, the proposed law would likely be challenged in court on grounds that it violates First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press. Defending his bill, Brodeur said, "Paid bloggers are lobbyists who write instead of talk. They both are professional electioneers. If lobbyists have to register and report, why shouldn't paid bloggers?" according to the Florida Politics news website.

The bill text defines bloggers as people who write for websites or webpages that are "frequently updated with opinion, commentary, or business content." Websites run by newspapers or "similar publications" are excluded from the definition. The proposed registration requirements apply to bloggers who receive payment in exchange for writing about elected state officers, including "the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature." Bloggers who write about a member of the legislature would have to register with the state Office of Legislative Services, while bloggers who write about the governor or other members of the executive branch would have to register with the Commission on Ethics.

Reddit is fighting a film-industry attempt to identify users who discussed piracy, telling a federal court that the studios' request for users' real names should be rejected and that one of the studios' arguments is "nonsense." From a report: "Courts have long recognized that the First Amendment protects online anonymity and have established a stringent standard to use in precisely this scenario, where a litigant seeks to unmask users for the purpose of providing evidence in litigation that does not involve those users... Plaintiffs are far from meeting that strict standard here," Reddit said Tuesday in a filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Reddit has no involvement in the lawsuit that triggered the request for users' identities -- the studios behind films such as Hellboy, Rambo V: Last Blood, Tesla, and The Hitman's Bodyguard sued cable broadband provider RCN in a different court, alleging that RCN failed to terminate Internet subscribers who illegally downloaded copyrighted movies. (RCN is now known as Astound Broadband after being combined with several other cable ISPs in the same ownership group.) In an attempt to prove that RCN turned a blind eye to users downloading copyrighted movies, the film studios subpoenaed Reddit seeking identifying information for specific users who commented in piracy-related threads. After Reddit provided information on only one user, calling the other requests a "fishing expedition," the studios filed a motion to compel Reddit to respond to the subpoena.

If an artificial intelligence machine can be named as an inventor for a patent, pet cats could be next, lawyers said at the UK's top court arguing only humans can be inventors in law. From a report: The UK's Supreme Court will decide whether an AI machine can be named as an inventor and who may own the patent. Imagination Engines founder, Stephen Thaler, challenged the rejection of his patent applications naming his AI machine as inventor for a beverage container and a flashing light. Allowing an AI machine to be named as the inventor can open doors to "plainly ridiculous assertion," Stuart Baran, a lawyer for the patent office, said in documents prepared for the case. Should the judges rule in favor of Thaler inventors could include "my cat Felix" or "cosmic forces," he said. Thaler tried registering the patent naming his system, DABUS, as inventor in several countries but was successful only in Australia and South Africa, according to the court documents.

A man who rented out servers configured for BitTorrent file-sharing use has been handed a three-month suspended sentence in Denmark. Known as 'seedboxes', these pre-configured servers are not illegal per se, but when customers used the devices to break copyright law on known pirate sites, rightsholders held the server provider liable. TorrentFreak reports: Local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance (Rettigheds Alliancen) mitigates all types of piracy but for the past few years, has maintained a keen focus on torrent sites. Working in partnership with the Danish government's SOIK IP-Task Force, Rights Alliance forced several sites to close down and successfully prosecuted site operators, staff members, and users who uploaded content to those sites. In 2021, Rights Alliance targeted specialized servers that not only supply content to torrent sites but also play a role in boosting download times while improving security.

In 2021, news broke that six people had been arrested in Denmark due to their alleged connections to several local torrent sites. Among them was Kasper Nielsen of internet services company HNielsen Networks, a supplier of servers under various brands that could be configured for 'seedbox' purposes. Available information indicated that the servers had been used by an unknown number of users to share content on private torrent sites ShareUniversity, Superbits and DanishBytes. [...] When Rights Alliance filed its criminal complaint against HNielsen Networks, the anti-piracy group referenced the landmark Filmspeler case which involved the sale of piracy-configured media players.

According to statements published by Rights Alliance and NSK (Saerlig Kriminalitet) Denmark's Special Crime Unit, Nielsen was convicted yesterday for selling seedboxes in the knowledge they were being used by others to share movies, TV shows, eBooks and other content, without permission from rightsholders. "On February 28, the Court in Aalborg ruled against the Danish owner behind a seedbox company for, in the period November 2020 to May 2021, having sold seedboxes and server capacity to an unknown number of people, knowing that they were used for illegal sharing of no less than 3,838 copyright-protected works on the Danish and Nordic file sharing services ShareUniversity, Superbits and DanishBytes," Rights Alliance reports. Nielsen was handed a three-month conditional (suspended) sentence and a confiscation order for DKK 300,000 (around $42,600), the amount users had paid his company to access the seedbox servers. The 35-year-old must also pay compensation of DKK 298,660 to Rights Alliance. "Providers of seedboxes have a responsibility to ensure that their services are not used for illegal uploading and downloading of copyrighted content, which the Rights Alliance can clearly see that they are doing," says Maria Fredenslund, Director of Rights Alliance. "Therefore, this case helps to send a signal to other providers that you cannot deliberately sell services to the illegal market."

Since Neilsen took a plea deal at an early stage, none of the claims made by Rights Alliance were needed to be proven in court. "The 3,838 figure and any evidence related to 'knowledge' of infringement carried out by seedbox customers on the sites, were accepted as true," reports TorrentFreak.

In the land of patent litigation, all patent trolls want to file in the US Western District of Texas Court. This court is infamous for being sympathetic to patent plaintiffs. That's why patent litigator WSOU Investments, aka Brazos Licensing and Development, went after Dell, EMC, and VMware in this Court. Usually, this would have been the smart move. Not this time. District Judge Alan Albright granted the defendants a directed verdict, and that was the end of the matter. From a report: What happened was this: WSOU, although successful before with their carpet bombing patent lawsuit strategy, failed this time. According to the lead defense counsel and Gibson Dunn partner, Brian A. Rosenthal, "This case got to trial because the plaintiff refused to come to their senses before trial. We obtained a number of serious exclusions of evidence prior to trial, and told them very early on the case had no merit." The judge agreed.

That came as a surprise to those of us who watch patent lawsuits, so you don't have to. As Heather Meeker, the well-known open-source and intellectual property (IP) lawyer, said, "This is surprisingly defendant-friendly from Judge Albright, who has received a lot of criticism for making Waco such a patent plaintiff-friendly docket." Until now, WSOU had been very successful. As a Patent Assertion Entity (PAEs), its only goal is to profit by acquiring patents and then suing companies that might be using the patents' intellectual property (IP) assets. It does this by using its portfolio of technology patents to file numerous individual suits involving different patents against companies. WSOU's main tactic, as Unified Patents put it, "forces operating companies to either settle or fight, on average, eight lawsuits at once."

Most companies faced with the financial burden of struggling with so many lawsuits settle rather than fight. Not this time. For the first time, companies decided to take the issues to court. In this particular set of cases, WSOU claimed in a June 2020 lawsuit that the defendants had infringed on three cloud infrastructure networking patents, and sought $435 million in damages. Rosenthal argued that the patents in question were old and irrelevant to the defendants' interests. The defense team had informed WSOU in October 2020 that there was no proof of direct infringement, but the plaintiff persisted with the case, leading to exclusions of evidence prior to trial. So it was that on the first day of the trial, two of the patents were tossed out on evidentiary rulings, and the plaintiff rested its case on the third day. The defense then requested a directed verdict, which was granted by Albright, resulting in a win for the defendants. In short, even this patent-friendly court could find no evidence at all for WSOU's assertions.