Legal Archive

Technology companies could face civil penalties for refusing to comply with court orders to help investigators access encrypted data under draft legislation nearing completion in the U.S. Senate, sources familiar with continuing discussions told Reuters on Wednesday. The long-awaited legislation from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, may be introduced as soon as next week, one of the sources said.

"I was all with you until I actually started getting briefed by the people in the Intel Community," Graham told Attorney General Loretta Lynch during an oversight hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I will say that I'm a person that's been moved by the arguments about the precedent we set and the damage we might be doing to our own national security."

The wall separating "foreign" intelligence operations from domestic criminal investigations has finally, fully collapsed. The FBI is now acting on a rule change initiated by the Bush administration, and finally massaged into actionable policy by Obama: Now, FBI agents can query the NSA's database of Americans' international communications, collected without warrants pursuant to Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. That law put congress' stamp of approval on the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which was widely denounced as totalitarian when the New York Times' James Risen exposed it to the world in 2005.

"We do not believe that courts should seek to resolve issues of 21st Century technology with a law that was written in the era of the adding machine," Smith said.

The EU-US Privacy Shield reflects the requirements set out by the European Court of Justice in its ruling on 6 October 2015, which declared the old Safe Harbour framework invalid. The new arrangement will provide stronger obligations on companies in the U.S. to protect the personal data of Europeans and stronger monitoring and enforcement by the U.S. Department of Commerce and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), including through increased cooperation with European Data Protection Authorities. The new arrangement includes commitments by the U.S. that possibilities under U.S. law for public authorities to access personal data transferred under the new arrangement will be subject to clear conditions, limitations and oversight, preventing generalised access. Europeans will have the possibility to raise any enquiry or complaint in this context with a dedicated new Ombudsperson.

The European Court of Justice has just ruled that the transatlantic Safe Harbour agreement, which lets American companies use a single standard for consumer privacy and data storage in both the US and Europe, is invalid. The ruling came after Edward Snowden's NSA leaks showed that European data stored by US companies was not safe from surveillance that would be illegal in Europe.

Google and Microsoft have agreed to end their long-running patent feud over smartphones and video game systems, dropping about 20 lawsuits in the U.S. and Germany.

The two companies, which didn't disclose financial terms, have been litigating over technology innovations for five years. Google's former Motorola Mobility unit had been demanding royalties on the Xbox video-gaming system, and Microsoft had sought to block Motorola mobile phones from using certain features.

The following companies just betrayed billions of people.

Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, and a handful of other tech companies just began publicly lobbying Congress to pass the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a bill that would give corporations total legal immunity when they share private user data with the government and with each other. Many of these companies have previously claimed to fight for their users' privacy rights, but by supporting this bill they've made it clear that they've abandoned that position, and are willing to endanger their users' security and civil rights in exchange for government handouts and protection.

The ongoing legal saga known as the Oracle-Google copyright battle took a huge leap Wednesday when Oracle claimed the last six Android operating systems are "infringing Oracle's copyrights in the Java platform."

That's according to the latest paperwork Oracle filed in the five-year-old closely watched case that so far has resulted in the determination that Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are, indeed, copyrightable.

On Monday, the Supreme Court opted not to review a 2014 ruling on copyright law that held Google's Android operating system infringed copyrights relating to Oracle's Java platform. This is a disaster for the software industry.

Here's the problem: the digital economy depends on gadgets and software being able to communicate seamlessly. Last year's decision by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals opened the possibility that efforts to make software work together better could trigger copyright liability. The result could be more compatibility problems and less innovation.

The Justice Department is weighing in on the hot-button intellectual property dispute between Google and Oracle, telling the Supreme Court that APIs are protected by copyright.

The Obama administration's position means it is siding with Oracle and a federal appeals court that said application programming interfaces are subject to copyright protections. The high court in January asked for the government's views on the closely watched case.

Michael Bromwich was in court with the most powerful company and the top government law agency in the country when he seemed to get antsy. Apple and the United States Department of Justice had, after all, been exchanging jabs about him. “I'd like to be heard, your Honor, if I can,” he told the judge, who said they’d need to “exhaust the arguments of the main combatants” first.

Wanting to interject would be understandable, considering how long Bromwich and Apple had been putting up their dukes inside and outside of court in a bloody fight over cash and corporate power. In July 2013, Apple was found guilty of conspiring to fix market prices for ebooks. The judge in the case, Denise Cote, said there was "a clear portrait of a conscious commitment to cross a line and engage in illegal behavior." The prosecution’s case was so clear-cut, and Apple showed such little contrition, according to Cote, that it wasn’t enough to take the company’s word that it would change. To make sure Apple fell in line, she called in help.

That would turn out to be Bromwich, a bearded, bespectacled attorney appointed by the court to be Apple’s corporate monitor for two years, a job made to ensure Apple complied with court rulings.

The European Union's decision to take on Google last week stems from official complaints by 19 companies in Europe and the United States, including Microsoft and a number of small firms, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

The FCC officially published its new net neutrality rules to the Federal Register yesterday, opening the door to legal challenges. Opponents wasted no time. CTIA, the trade association that has represented the wireless industry since 1984, filed a lawsuit with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals today. In a blog post, the group wrote that it intends to push back against "the FCC’s decision to impose sweeping new net neutrality rules and reclassifying mobile broadband as a common carrier utility." The National Cable and Telecommunications Association and the American Cable Association also filed suits along similar grounds.