LOS ANGELES — Opening statements in a criminal Xbox 360 modding case are set to begin here early Wednesday, a day after 12 jurors were picked to decide the outcome of the first-of-its kind trial. It took five hours to empanel a jury, whose members include a university student dean, music ...

LimeWire on Tuesday finally shuttered its file sharing services months after a federal judge sided with the Recording Industry Association of America and found the New York company liable for a “substantial amount of copyright infringement” that the music industry claims amount to $1 billion. The 4-year-old case, brought by the ...

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke issued a blistering diatribe against music piracy Monday, declaring it “a growing threat” that “should be dealt with accordingly.” “This isn’t just an issue of right and wrong,” Locke said in a speech at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the nation’s musical focal points. “This ...

A Las Vegas company established to sue bloggers who clip news content is expanding its operations to a second newspaper chain. Righthaven, LLC has struck a deal with Arkansas-based WEHCO Media to expand its copyright litigation campaign, in which bloggers and aggregators across the country are being sued on allegations of ...

Facebook has sued a little-known website for educators called Teachbook, claiming Facebook literally owns the “book” when it comes to naming social networking sites. “Misappropriating the distinctive book portion of Facebook’s trademark, defendant has created its own competing online networking community in a blatant attempt to become a Facebook ‘for Teachers,’” ...

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post ...

If you’ve used BitTorrent to snag unauthorized copies of independent films you should be interested in the arguments unfolding in Wednesday in federal court in Washington, DC. At issue is a mass-litigation campaign, in which the fledgling US Copyright Group is suing about 15,000 users whose IP addresses were detected harvesting ...

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a patent for a method to hedge weather-related financial risk, but declined to make it more difficult to patent “business methods” or software. The unanimous court found the patent too “abstract,” but emphasized that its ruling was intended neither to narrow nor widen patent ...

The association representing 380,000 composers, songwriters, lyricists and others associated with the music industry has begun a fund-raising campaign to stifle groups that support free culture and digital rights. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is urging the membership to donate money to battle the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public ...

Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel unveiled Tuesday the Obama administration’s first “Joint Strategic Plan” concerning intellectual property enforcement — and she gave a big nod to fair use. The plan was required under the Pro-IP Act of 2008, which created Espinel’s post. The act was watered down to eliminate a Justice Department ...