Politics and Law

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched a new political action group, FWD.us, to focus on immigration reform.

Zuckerberg, who announced the move through an editorial in The Washington Post, called U.S. immigration policy "strange" for a nation of immigrants and "unfit for today's world."

As a result, a deep roster of tech executives have banded to together to push a bipartisan policy agenda to change how the U.S. approaches immigration. The group has vowed to work with members of Congress from both parties, the administration, and state and local officials. It plans … Read more

A controversial data-sharing bill won the approval of a key congressional committee today without privacy amendments, raising concerns that the National Security Agency and other spy agencies will gain broad access to Americans' personal information.

The House Intelligence committee, by a vote of 18 to 2, adopted the so-called CISPA bill after an unusual session closed to the public where panel members debated and voted on the proposed law in secret.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who proposed three unsuccessful privacy amendments, said afterward she was disappointed her colleagues did not limit the NSA and other intelligence agencies from collecting sensitive … Read more

Samsung found itself the target of a police raid in South Korea on Monday over the alleged theft of OLED display panel technology.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency investigated Samsung's headquarters in Asan, South Korea, in an attempt to find documents related to OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology, Bloomberg reported late yesterday.

Police are trying to determine whether Samsung is tangled up in an alleged leak of OLED technology documents by partners of LG Display, a Samsung spokesman told Bloomberg. No details were revealed as to who called the police, but LG said it didn't contact them.

"… Read more

The Internal Revenue Service doesn't believe it needs a search warrant to read your e-mail.

Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers say that Americans enjoy "generally no privacy" in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications -- meaning that they can be perused without obtaining a search warrant signed by a judge.

That places the IRS at odds with a growing sentiment among many judges and legislators who believe that Americans' e-mail messages should be protected from warrantless search and seizure. They say e-mail should be protected by the same Fourth Amendment … Read more

STANFORD, Calif. -- Self-driving cars are expected to save lives: a vehicle driven by a human will experience, on average, a crash every 160,000 miles or so. It's only a matter of time, advocates say, before robots become better drivers than us.

That is, if the lawyers let them. Industry insiders are already fretting about a host of legal problems that could bedevil robot car makers once a sufficient number of their creations take to the roads. Product liability, tort law, negligence, foreseeable harm, patent encumbrance, and design defects are only some of the concerns.

"The longer … Read more

It's hip to be litigious.

In case the spat between Apple and Samsung, and myriad other tussles between tech giants weren't proof enough, comes a new study that says lawsuits filed by patent trolls last year made up the majority of patent-related complaints filed in the U.S.

The study, which was published by UC Hastings and Lex Machina this morning, analyzed about 13,000 cases spanning some 30,000 patents. It's a follow-up to last October's look at some 100 lawsuits, which found that lawsuits from patent firms were up 22 percent in the past … Read more

You may eventually be able to transfer files between a computer and mobile device just by placing the two near each other.

Published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an Apple patent application known as "Apparatus and method for interacting with handheld carrier hosting media content," describes a file transfer technology that automatically kicks in when two devices are positioned next to each other. One device would sense when the other is nearby and then send or receive a certain document, picture, song, or other item.

As one example, you may be creating an e-mail … Read more

Apple should now be able to win custody of the "iPad Mini" trademark as long as it adds a disclaimer to its application.

In a letter apparently sent to Apple last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office said Apple would need to make it clear that it seeks only to trademark the term "iPad Mini" and not the actual word "mini." Such a disclaimer would ensure that other companies could add the word "mini" to their own product names.

"Applicant must disclaim the descriptive wording 'mini' apart from the … Read more

You can now search among 2 million confidential, or formerly confidential, government documents courtesy of Wikileaks.

The whistle-blowing group has set up a new "public library of U.S. diplomacy" offering more than 1.7 million diplomatic files from 1973 to 1976. Dubbed "The Kissinger Cables," the files reveal diplomatic cables, intelligence reports, and congressional correspondence, many of which relate to then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

As expected, the documents focus on some hot-button issues, including U.S. involvement with dictatorships in Latin America and Greece and the 1973 "Yom Kippur war" … Read more