by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The use of peer-to-peer networks for sharing files has come under fire during recent months, including the dismantling of Swedish BitTorrent site Pirate Bay, but it turns out even members of Congress need to be kept in check over their file-sharing practices.
Microsoft Corp., Bank of America Corp. and L.L. Bean Inc. are just some of the companies that have flooded the Supreme Court with advice as it prepares for Monday’s arguments over one of the biggest questions involving intellectual property: When can a business method be patented?
The sale of The Pirate Bay probably ranks as the week’s biggest news for those of us who obsess about copyright issues, followed by the ruling that Usenet.com’s newsgroup-access service infringed on the major record companies’ copyrights and the Supreme Court’s decision not to take Hollywood’s appeal of the Cablevision network DVR ruling
by Ashby Jones, Editor, Law Blog, The Wall Street Journal
When we last used our waterfall metaphor in regard to Joe Nacchio, the former Qwest CEO convicted two years ago on insider-trading charges, an inquiring reader asked if we’d bring Nacchio back up the fall if and when the Supreme Court reversed his conviction. Our answer: absolutely.
If a false entry in a database leads to a unconstitutional police search that reveals illegal drugs, does the government get to hold it against you?
That’s the question the Supreme Court will tackle on Tuesday.
by Deborah Gage, Staff Writer, San Francisco Chronicle
Like many people, Alan Dechert was outraged when the 2000 presidential election was thrown to the Supreme Court because nobody could figure out how Florida’s voters had voted.
An engineer who has designed and tested software for a living, he thinks the outcomes of elections should never be in doubt.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.