Law & Disorder

Pity the poor plastic disk—London's burglars won't even grab them anymore. It's not hard to see why. Imagine yourself in black mask and gloves, creeping through the darkened Grosvenor Square residence of Lady Fincherton-Smythe, trying to decide what to stuff into your sack.

You see a huge pile of CDs and DVDs—recent, chart-topping hits that belong to Lady Fincherton-Smythe's wastrel son, Nigel "Pikey" Fincherton-Smythe—the sort of thing that might have brought in quite a few quid in the mid-90s. You hesitate; surely some of the lads round the pub wouldn't mind a discounted version of that Dr. Who DVD box set?

But then you remember that the sort of lads who don't ask too many questions about the goods you proffer are the sort of lads who now get their Dr. Who fix from the Internet's darker back alleys. Everyone else seems to use iTunes or Amazon's LoveFilm or the online TV "catch-up" services from the BBC and others. Stolen digital media on little plastic discs just doesn't have the same commercial potential it once did. You pass by the discs and instead pick up Pikey's aging Windows laptop and an iPod loaded with a horrifying array of Europop. Now these could still bring in a a bit of dosh. You sneak back into London's foggy streets.

The Economist notes this shift in criminal thinking.

“Years ago, you’d see a man in a pub selling CDs,” says Eric Phelps, a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police. “Not any more.” Indeed, thefts of entertainment products like CDs and DVDs have collapsed in England and Wales, to the point that they are now taken in just 7 percent of all burglaries in which something is stolen. They are now targeted no more frequently than are toiletries and cigarettes.

Even snatch-and-grab men now know that the CD's day is nearly done.

Trojans—they're not just for hackers anymore. German police, for instance, love them; a scandal erupted in Parliament last year after federal investigators were found to be using custom spyware that could potentially record far more information than allowed by law. The story made headlines, but it lacked a certain sense of the bizarre.

Fortunately for connoisseurs of the weird, Der Spiegel revealed a stranger story in its magazine yesterday. According to the report, a top German security official installed a trojan on his own daughter's computer to monitor her Internet usage. What could possibly go wrong?

Nothing—well, at least until one of the daughter's friends found the installed spyware. The friend then went after the dad's personal computer as a payback and managed to get in, where he found a cache of security-related e-mails from work. The e-mails, in turn, provided the information necessary for hackers to infiltrate Germany's federal police.

That was bad, but it got worse. The hackers got into the servers for the "Patras" program, which logs location data on suspected criminals through cell phone and car GPS systems. Concerned about security breaches, the government eventually had to take the entire set of Patras servers offline.

One moral of the tale: parents, think hard before taking technical measures against your own kids. There's a better than average chance that they—or their friends—know more than you do.

A court in Paris, France has fined Google $65,000 because its search engine's autocomplete feature brings up the French word for "crook" when users type the name of an insurance company.

Google had been sued by insurance company Lyonnaise de Garantie, which was offended by search results including the word "escroc," meaning crook, according to a story posted Tuesday by the Courthouse News Service. "Google had argued that it was not liable since the word, added under Google Suggest, was the result of an automatic algorithm and did not come from human thought," the article states. "A Paris court ruled against Google, however, pointing out that the search engine ignored requests to remove the offending word... In addition to the fine, Google must also remove the term from searches associated with Lyonnaise de Garantie."

A Forbes story says such a ruling is unlikely to occur in the US. But it "sets a bad precedent for Google in Europe. There are quite a few people and companies out there who may have suggestions for their names that could be considered defamatory."

Despite protests and threats of legal action, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is pushing ahead with its plans to expand the availability of top-level domains. The plan, approved in June of 2011, will potentially lead to a flood of new name space for websites beyond the established national TLDs (like .us and .uk) and generic TLDs such as .com, .net. and .gov.

Starting January 12, ICANN will begin accepting applications for TLDs, with a registration fee of $185,000. But there's no timetable for the approval of applications, and according to a report by Reuters, it will start off slowly. ICANN has also promised to quickly take down sites under the new TLD system that violate registered trademarks.

As we reported in November, the Association of National Advertisers and other member organizations of the Coalition for Responsible Internet Domain Oversight have been lobbying heavily against the plan, out of concerns that it will force companies to register domains across each of the new TLDs registered to defend their trademarks and avoid potential Internet name grabs, either by "cyber-squatters" seeking to sell the registered domains at a profit, or by criminals seeking to use the domains for phishing attacks and other forms of Internet fraud against their customers. Dan Jaffe, the executive vice president for government relations at ANA, claimed that the new TLDs could cost companies millions by forcing them to register domains defensively and constantly monitor new websites for trademark infringements.

Righthaven is in the final throes of full collapse. The copyright lawsuit factory claimed to have less than $1,000 in operating capital when opposition lawyers attempted to collect a judgment against Righthaven, and the company's lawyers have simply been ignoring court actions and have not shown up for proceedings. One Righthaven defendant is now asking a court to hold them in contempt.

To add to Righthaven's indignities, the company is now being sued by its process server, Las Vegas-based Legal Wings, Inc. Legal Wings claims that Righthaven rang up $5,670 in charges during 2010 (note: this was even before Righthaven began listing like an oil tanker on a reef) but has refused to pay up.

"Plaintiff has made repeated demands for payment of the monies dues and owing on the Agreement, but the Defendant has failed and refused, and still fails and refuses to pay the balance owed to Plaintiff," says a new court action from Legal Wings, which wants its cash.

One gets the strong sense that Righthaven sees the legal system as a sort of winepress, terrific for squeezing smalltime bloggers until the cash flows out. But when the majesty of the law attempts to put the squeeze on Righthaven, it's fine to simply walk away.

Fortunately, Righthaven's alleged sin in this particular case is simply walking away from a $5,670 debt. Had it been something as horrific as posting a local news article on a blog, the company could be facing up to $150,000 in fines.

Microsoft today filed a legal complaint against Comet, a UK retailer which the company alleges sold 94,000 sets of Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs without Microsoft's blessing. While Microsoft called the CDs counterfeits, Comet says it was acting in good faith, supplying customers with recovery discs when Microsoft would not.

Microsoft noted that the recovery CDs were sold to customers who had purchased Windows-loaded PCs and laptops. Comet operates 248 stores as well as an online shopping site.

“As detailed in the complaint filed today, Comet produced and sold thousands of counterfeit Windows CDs to unsuspecting customers in the United Kingdom,” Microsoft associate general counsel David Finn said in a statement posted on Microsoft's website. “Comet’s actions were unfair to customers. We expect better from retailers of Microsoft products—and our customers deserve better, too.”

Comet responded with a statement of its own, saying it believes what it did was legal. "Comet has sought and received legal advice from leading counsel to support its view that the production of recovery discs did not infringe Microsoft’s intellectual property," the company said. "Comet firmly believes that it acted in the very best interests of its customers. It believes its customers had been adversely affected by the decision to stop supplying recovery discs with each new Microsoft Operating System based computer. Accordingly Comet is satisfied that it has a good defence to the claim and will defend its position vigorously."

UPDATE: We asked Microsoft for some more information on its complaint, which was filed in the High Court of Justice in London. We still don't have a copy of the full complaint, but Microsoft's expanded statement says the PCs Comet sold already included recovery software, making the discs unnecessary. "In 2008 and 2009, Comet approached tens of thousands of customers who had bought PCs with the necessary recovery software already on the hard drive, and offered to sell them unnecessary recovery discs for £14.99," Microsoft said. "Not only was the recovery software already provided on the hard drive by the computer manufacturer but, if the customer so desired, a recovery disc could also have been obtained by the customer from the PC manufacturer for free or a minimal amount. Illegally replicating software and then selling it is counterfeiting."

On Thursday, wireless telecom giant Verizon Wireless said it would begin charging consumers a $2 "convenience fee" for some bill payments starting January 15. That decision, which Verizon said was necessary to cover the costs of processing some payments, caught the attention of the Federal Communications Commission. Verizon then decided the fee wasn't such a hot idea after all.

In a press release posted Friday afternoon, the wireless provider announced that customer feedback had led to a change in plans. “At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers. Based on their input, we believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time,” said Dan Mead, president and chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless in a statement.

An FCC official told the New York Times on Friday that it would "look into" the $2 charge, which would apply to any customer making one-time payments online or over the phone using credit or debit cards. Even as it took a beating on Twitter, Verizon initially defended itself, saying it would go ahead with the fee. "Customers have a number of alternatives to pay their bill and not incur the convenience fee," Verizon spokesperson Brenda Raney told Bloomberg. "Paying the fee is an option, not an absolute."