Tag: COURT

Watch out, West Coast Web jesters, because a new California law prohibiting online impersonations officially went into effect this weekend. Violators of SB 1411 will face a fine of up to $1,000 and/or a year in jail. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed SB 1411 back in September, and immediately drew the ire of free speech advocates from around the country. While the law doesn't explicitly ...

Share Leon Walker recently discovered that his wife was having an affair, after he read some of her e-mails. Doing so, however, may just land him in prison. Last year, Walker reportedly hacked into his wife's Gmail account, using a laptop that the couple shared. He then found out that his wife, Clara, was having an affair with her second husband, who previously had been arrested for beating ...

A man from New Jersey has been sentenced to 33 months in prison for making death threats against three federal judges on his blog. Right-wing blogger Hal Turner reportedly took issue with a 2009 ruling from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which dismissed legal challenges to handgun bans in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois. Disgusted with the decision, Turner took to his blog, where he ...

A U.S. appeals court has determined that federal investigators must obtain a search warrant before accessing a suspect's e-mail account, in a ruling that makes an obscene amount of sense. The case, U.S. v. Warshak, involves a man named Steven Warshak, who created Enzyte -- the "natural male enhancement." A few years ago, Warshak came under fire from the FTC, which claimed that his products ...

A court in London has granted bail to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, just a few days after the elusive Australian turned himself in to the authorities. The 39-year old is facing allegations of rape, molestation and illegal use of force, stemming from separate alleged incidents in Stockholm reported over the summer. Assange came to British police last week in response to a European arrest ...

Facebook and Twitter have created plenty of courtroom headaches for jurors and judges, but new research from Reuters Legal shows just how many trials have been derailed by the Internet -- and, more importantly, just how many jurors continue to defy legal protocol online. The report shows that, since 1999, Web-related juror misconduct has led to at least 90 challenged verdicts -- more than half ...

The trial of Steven J. Hayes, who was recently convicted of murdering a Cheshire, Connecticut mother and her two children, has had the state riveted for months. Even Democratic and Republican candidates were compelled to discuss the case on the campaign trail. The media may have played a central role in keeping everyone tuned in to the case, as reporters frequently took to Twitter to describe ...

Over the course of the past few months, the Egyptian government has taken a particularly hard-line stance against Facebook-based activism, many authorities believing it to pose a legitimate threat to President Hosni Mubarak. In March, a military tribunal unsuccessfully attempted to silence a controversial blogger named Ahmed Mustafa, barely three years after Egypt had jailed another writer for ...

Jammie Thomas-Rasset has endured a long legal battle with the recording industry ever since she was accused of illegally downloading files in 2006. Her case took another turn for the worse yesterday, after a Minneapolis jury decided -- in her third trial -- that she was liable for $1.5 million in copyright infringement damages to Capitol Records. The Minnesota woman was ordered to pay the ...

The U.S. Department of the Interior is currently looking for a company to help construct a new e-mail and collaboration product. According to Google, though, the competition for the lucrative contract isn't exactly fair -- and the company is now going to federal court to prove its point. In a suit filed Friday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the search engine giant alleged that the ...

Cash-strapped record labels are undoubtedly rejoicing today, now that LimeWire has officially shut down its peer-to-peer filesharing client. As All Things Digital explains, the move comes in response to a federal court injunction that requires the company to shut down "the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality" of its core ...

The next time you save child pornography on your hard drive, you probably shouldn't save it under a name like 'KiddiePornXXX.' Doing so, it turns out, may give law enforcement officials the green light to search and seize your hard drive. That's exactly what happened to Corey Beantee Melton, from Alabama, after he took his computer to get repaired at a local Best Buy. When Best Buy's Geek Squad ...

Facebook users in New York may have an entirely new reason to mind their online p's and q's, thanks to a state judge's decision to allow private Facebook posts as court evidence. As Forbes explains, the Suffolk County, New York case involved a woman who was personally injured after falling out of an office chair in 2003. Claiming that the incident was due to the chair's defective construction, ...

A man convicted of manslaughter will get another chance to plead his case before a jury of his peers, now that a Florida Court of Appeals has overturned his conviction because of an iPhone. In 2006, 62-year-old Jose Tapanes was charged with fatally shooting his 19-year-old neighbor Christopher Cote after Cote had walked his dog on Tapanes's lawn. During the ensuing manslaughter trial, Tapanes's ...

A federal judge in California recently ruled that police can place a GPS on a person's car without his or her knowledge without seeking a warrant. CNN reports that Juan Pineda-Moreno's appeal was rejected for the third time in early August by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers nine West Coast states. Pineda-Moreno claimed that Oregon DEA agents had violated his privacy by ...