Articles about The Law

What's the first word that pops into your head when you hear Bitcoin? It's probably cryptocurrency, but a judge in Florida says this is wrong -- it's actually property.

In a case relating to alleged money laundering, Judge Teresa Pooler ruled that the charges could not stick as Bitcoin was not money, and therefore could not be laundered. With the decision that Bitcoin cannot be considered a 'monetary instrument', this could have implications for future cases.

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Helping out with a drug trafficking case, Yahoo was able to recover emails that had previously been deleted. Now a judge wants to know how this was possible.

Yahoo's only policies state that email cannot be recovered once they have been deleted, and defense lawyers for Russell Knaggs -- who planned to move cocaine from South America -- want to know how the company was able to produce deleted email in this case.

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Even though US authorities have taken down KickassTorrents and managed to get owner Artem Vaulin arrested in Poland, the most popular BitTorrent website in the world is now back in the game.

KickassTorrents is alive and well through two working mirrors which have been set up by supporters to ensure that fans can continue to enjoy the content distributed through the website. In the wake of these events, it would seem that it's business as usual in BitTorrent land.

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The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revealed the true scale of online crime in England and Wales, and it is high enough to effectively double the overall crime rate. The previous estimate about the number of online crimes was 3.8 million, but the latest figures show that it is in fact over 5.8 million.

The ONS says that a tenth of adults have fallen victim to online crime, and incidents are not specific to particular areas or social classes. The statistics take into account virus attacks, online fraud, phishing attacks and the like, with 3.8 million of the overall 5.8 million incidents accounted for by various sorts of fraud.

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The Ukrainian owner of KickassTorrents (KAT) has been arrested in Poland and his torrent-touting website seized by authorities. Artem Vaulin -- who also goes by the name 'tirm' -- stands accused of criminal copyright infringement, as well as conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and money laundering.

The Department of Justice says that the site owned by 30-year-old Vaulin "has enabled users to illegally reproduce and distribute hundreds of millions of copies of copyrighted motion pictures, video games, television programs, musical recordings and other electronic media, collectively valued at more than $1 billion". Authorities now want to extradite him to the US to face prosecution.

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Qualcomm is facing a $900 million fine in South Korea after its Fair Trade Commission found that the California-based chipset company had charged smartphone manufacturers unfairly for its mobile processors.

The company was found guilty of breaching fair trade rules at the conclusion of the agency’s 17-month investigation. Qualcomm charged Samsung, LG and other South Korean smartphone manufacturers higher licensing fees than it should have for its mobile processors. The company used the wholesale price of a smartphone to calculate the fees as opposed to the actual cost of the chips.

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Yesterday, Europe's Competition Commission expanded its legal assault against Alphabet and major subsidiary Google. Four monopolies are under fire: AdSense, Android, search, and shopping services. Trustbusters allege that Google uses anticompetitive tactics to protect its market dominance, which share ranges from 80 percent to 90 percent in each category. Behind the charges is a hoity-toity attitude typical of overly-protectionist EU regulators. What if the information giant gave them what they want?

Imagine this: Google shuts down operations across the entire Euro zone—in a Brexit-like departure, but suddenly with no preparations. Switch it off. Search and other services could remain available in Britain and to all other non-EU countries. The company surely has the means, starting with IP blocking and expanding to other measures. The risk: Confirming just how dominant is Google, because of the incredible negative consequences. But the chaos also would lead to an outcry to restore services, while illuminating how important Big G is to citizens and how greatly businesses benefit, or profit, from the monopolies.

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Alphabet Admirals Sergey Brin and Larry Page had better tell Captain Sundar Pichai to close the watertight doors—lest the search and advertising ship sink in the North Sea, where depths reach 700 meters (2,300). Brrrr. Are the lawyers handing out life preservers? Will paralegals man the water pumps?

Today's expansion of the European Union Competition Commission's investigation into Google business practices makes a really bad situation much, much, much worse. Problems are these: Adding advertising to anticompetitive charges; expanding investigation to four monopolies (AdSense, Android, search, shopping services); citing exclusive contracts as violation of the law; and narrowing the applicable market for search shopping competition, thus blowing apart one of Google's major counter legal arguments. Kaboom!

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To the amazement of some, and the disappointment of others, the FBI today recommended that no charges be brought against Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server. The presidential hopeful was roundly criticized, however, with James Comey describing her actions as "extremely careless".

The FBI director's remarks came after Clinton took part in a voluntary interview over the weekend, and after the bureau's investigation found that her private email account had indeed been used to send classified and even secret information -- officially a misdemeanour. The FBI's line is that "no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case".

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It's the issue that just won't go away for Hillary Clinton -- her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state. Today the Democratic presidential hopeful has been questioned by the FBI about her emails.

The Justice Department's investigation aims to determine if Clinton used the email account to send communication relating to national security, and whether this is illegal. She says the account was created for convenience and has denied using it to send classified information.

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Facebook has won an appeal against a court ruling that said the social network could not store data about people who did not have an account. It had been ruled that Facebook could not gather data about non-users in Belgium; Facebook responded by blocking access to those without an account.

Back in 2015, Facebook was told to stop this blocking or face hefty daily fines. Facebook felt that the ruling was unfair and appealed. In a new ruling today, the Brussels Court of Appeal said: "Belgian courts don't have international jurisdiction over Facebook Ireland, where the data concerning Europe is processed".

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By booking sales through its international headquarters in Ireland, Apple was able to only pay £12.9 million in UK corporate tax during 2015. This is a nine percent increase from the previous year, in which it paid £11.8 million.

The European Commission has been investigating Apple’s tax arrangements in Ireland for two years now and the results of the probe are set to be released as early as next month. If the company’s tax arrangements are found to be unlawful, it could end up repaying billions to the Irish state.

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New laws have been proposed for England and Wales that would criminalize not only the circulation of revenge porn, but also threatening to circulate it. The definition of what constitutes revenge porn could also be expanded.

This level of criminalization is already in force in Scotland, and Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael believes that the rest of Britain should follow suit. If adopted, the proposed change would see revenge porn threats seen in much the same light as other forms of blackmail.

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Using cloud apps in a business environment, be it Shadow IT or not, is going to be risky business in a couple of years, as a vast majority of today’s widely used apps do not comply with the upcoming rules and regulations of the EU GDPR.

GDPR, or general data protection regulation, is a EU-crafted document aimed at regulating the corporate use of data, and how businesses must act in order to ensure maximum safety of customer data used, as well as privacy. It will come into force in less than two years.

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Google has won a case brought against it by Oracle in which it was accused of infringing on copyright by using Java APIs in Android. But at the end of a two-week trial, the jury found in Google's favor saying that 'fair use' was an acceptable defense.

Had Google lost the case, it could have cost the company billions of dollars and would have set something of a precedent. This was the first major case in which a company tried to use copyright law to control the use of APIs.

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