Politics and Law

MobiTV, a company that streams television channels to mobile devices, is upset that someone has pointed out a link on its Web site that lets anyone watch TV for free.

So it's threatening to sue.

A letter that a lawyer for MobiTV sent to the owner of HowardForums.com on March 4 invokes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and says posting the hyperlink is a violation of U.S. copyright and trade secrets law. (Howard Forums is a popular place to find information about mobile devices, including technical tips and availability of unlocked phones.)

(For the record, Howard Chui, … Read more

q&a SAN JOSE--T.J. Rodgers is an unapologetic capitalist who happens to be the chief executive of San Jose, Calif.'s, Cypress Semiconductor. The two roles, as you'll soon see, are deeply intertwined.

Cypress' product catalog includes things like programmable logic devices, USB controllers, and SRAM chips--the basic building blocks of modern gadgets and computers.

Today in Silicon Valley, though, Rodgers is just as well-known for his role in buying and building up SunPower, which sells rooftop solar systems that provide power at prices competitive with utility rates. SunPower's market capitalization is more than $5 billion, … Read more

q&a SAN JOSE, Calif.--T.J. Rodgers is an unapologetic capitalist who happens to be the chief executive of San Jose's Cypress Semiconductor. The two roles, as you'll soon see, are deeply intertwined.

Cypress's product catalog includes things like programmable logic devices, USB controllers, and SRAM chips--the basic building blocks of modern gadgets and computers.

Today in Silicon Valley, though, Rodgers is just as well known for his role in buying and building up SunPower, which sells rooftop solar systems that provide power at prices competitive with utility rates. SunPower's market capitalization is more … Read more

A Swiss bank that successfully sued to yank the Wikileaks.org domain name, and then faced a severe setback in a subsequent court ruling, has given up for now.

Bank Julius Baer filed a brief note with a court in San Francisco Wednesday saying it would voluntarily dismiss its own case, while reserving the right to file it again in the future or pursue it "in an alternate court, jurisdiction, or venue."

BJB's sudden move comes a few days after U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White reversed his earlier ruling (which pulled the plug on the Wikileaks.… Read more

In theory, Hillary Clinton should have been the perfect tech-friendly candidate in the Democratic race for the presidential nomination.

Practically from the moment she was sworn into office in 2001, the New York senator began wooing technology firms and their executives in preparation for her presidential bid.

She introduced five different broadband bills. She showed up at roundtables with chief executives like Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, Adobe Systems' Bruce Chizen, and Symantec's John Thompson. She spoke at a board meeting of the Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Apple, Cisco Systems, Dell, eBay, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. She … Read more

A seemingly odd phenomenon is occurring among some U.S. states that have flatly rejected the Real ID Act.

Even though officials in these states have publicly assured privacy-conscious voters that they steadfastly oppose Real ID's requirement of nationalized driver's licenses and ID cards, these same politicians and bureaucrats are quietly asking the Bush administration for more time to comply with the law.

The latest example is Oklahoma. In our special report published last month, we listed five states that--at the time we wrote the articles--indicated that they would not comply with Real ID. Those were Maine, South … Read more

Updated at 1:42 p.m. and again at 5:02 p.m. PST.

SAN FRANCISCO--Wikileaks is getting its domain name back.

After spending more than three hours hearing arguments from a raft of attorneys--two representing the Swiss bank that fought to get the site's plug pulled and about 10 who have been trying to get the site back online--a federal judge here has ruled in favor of Wikileaks.

Wikileaks, which uses Wikileaks.org as its primary domain, is a whistle-blowing site that focuses on posting leaked documents.

"The court denies the motion for preliminary injunction, and … Read more

The flap earlier this week in which Pakistan Telecom knocked YouTube.com off the Internet for two hours seems almost inexplicable.

It's not like when a court in Turkey blocked access to YouTube from within the country, or when China restricts Western news sites.

Those were country-specific and intentional. The outage on Sunday was global and, as far as we know, unintentional.

So what's to stop another Internet service provider--especially a government-owned one--from intentionally trying this trick? It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which North Korea feels like yanking Voice of America off the Internet, … Read more

Wikileaks.org, a Web site that specializes in posting leaked documents often provided by whistleblowers, had its domain name yanked by a federal judge in California earlier this month.

Now Wikileaks is receiving some independent legal support from free speech groups, including Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They--and some media organizations also expected to file a brief--are asking to intervene on Wikileaks' behalf.

These folks are the .50 caliber rifles (or, perhaps the .818 caliber Solothurns) of the modern free speech movement. If … Read more