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.

Congress on Tuesday introduced the Secure Federal File Sharing Act, which would restrict the use of peer-to-peer file sharing software like Limewire among federal employees.

The new legislation follows multiple embarrassing leaks of sensitive government information by means of open file sharing networks, including the location of a safe house for the First Family, financial files belonging to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the electronic schematics to President Obama’s helicopter, and a list of 30 lawmakers currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

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Microsoft Corp., (MSFT) Bank of America Corp. (BAC) 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?

There has been a surge in companies receiving patents for ways of doing business, from Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) one-click checkout to Priceline.com Inc.’s (PCLN) reverse auctions, since a 1998 court decision expanded the scope of processes that could be patented.

The Supreme Court must now determine whether such swaths of modern business activity deserve patent protections, thereby opening the door to infringement lawsuits, or belong in the public domain, depriving their inventors of monopoly profits.

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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 (CVC) network DVR ruling. But two other developments in U.S. courts seem more important to the average music fan because of the potential they have for disrupting digital services.

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When we last used our waterfall metaphor in regard to Joe Nacchio, the former Qwest (Q) 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. We’ll airlift him back and deposit him safely on the riverbank, well out of harm’s way. We might also give him a blanket and a picnic basket stuffed with goodies.

But for now, things don’t look so good. His fall is about to begin. On Monday, the Tenth Circuit denied his request for bail pending the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to take up his case. Barring an eleventh-hour reprieve Tuesday morning from Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who oversees the Tenth Circuit, Nacchio will report to prison later today.

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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 in a case civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center argue will have broad implications in a world where we are constantly being evaluated against databases and watch lists that are riddled with frustratingly persistent errors.

“In these interlinked databases, one error can spread like a disease, infecting every system it touches and condemning the individual to whom this error refers to suffer substantial delay, harassment, and improper arrest,” EPIC director Marc Rotenberg argued in a friend of the court brief.

Not surprisingly, the government disagrees.

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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.

So Dechert and a couple of colleagues founded the Open Voting Consortium, a nonprofit group dedicated to delivering “trustable and open voting systems.” In addition to lobbying against proprietary voting machines, they have spent the last several years working with scientists and engineers around the world to design and build a voting machine of their own.

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