intellectual property

Fewer people are illegally downloading and sharing music, NPD Group said in a report today.

Among those surveyed for NPD's "Annual Music Study 2012," 40 percent who illegally downloaded music via peer-to-peer services in 2011 said they had stopped or decreased their illegal downloads in 2012.

Overall, the number of illegally downloaded songs from P2P services dropped by 26 percent in 2012 from 2011.

Part of that was due to an overall decline in the use of P2P services. At the 2005 peek of P2P file sharing networks, 33 million people used them. For 2012, that number … Read more

Carmen Ortiz, the embattled U.S. attorney who charged the late activist Aaron Swartz with multiple felonies, has responded to critics by saying complaints about any prosecutorial overzealousness are "inaccurate" and "unfair."

Ortiz, 57, said in a radio interview that a wave of criticism -- which includes a congressional investigation, a court Web site hack, and a petition demanding her removal from office -- is off-base and uninformed.

"I have heard some of the claims in terms of being overzealous, or lack of supervision" of prosecutors in the office, Ortiz, who was appointed by … Read more

A petition asking President Obama to oppose a new rule restricting cell phone owners from unlocking their devices has passed the 100,000 mark, meaning the White House is now obliged to respond.

The petition, which passed the threshold last night and now stands at more than 102,000 signatures, protests a regulation from the Library of Congress that prohibits unlocking phones without the carrier's permission -- even when a customer's contract with the carrier has expired.

"I think it's terrific," said Derek Khanna, a Yale visiting fellow who was previously a Republican Hill staffer … Read more

The White House warned today of the threat posed by WikiLeaks, LulzSec, and other "hacktivist" groups that have the ability to target U.S. companies and expropriate confidential data.

A new administration-wide strategy (PDF) disclosed at a high-profile event in Washington that included Attorney General Eric Holder says the theft of trade secrets is on the rise and predicts such theft will undermine U.S. national security unless halted.

It's a "steadily increasing threat to America's economy and national security interests," Holder said at the event, which also featured officials from the State Department … Read more

The most remarkable aspect of a new and deeply troubling report about network intrusions originating in China is how commonplace they've become. They're no longer a rare occurrence: A single Shanghai-based hacking organization has reportedly compromised at least 141 companies across 20 industries.

Those figures come from a new report from security firm Mandiant, which revealed the global accomplishments of a group of professional hackers dubbed APT1. Mandiant has assembled convincing evidence that APT1 is actually part of People's Liberation Army Unit 61398, an organization so far uninterested in defacing or deleting data from U.S.-based … Read more

Patent reforms passed last year don't go far enough to fully protect entrepreneurs from software patent holders who try to exploit them, President Barack Obama said today in his fourth annual appearance on YouTube following the State of the Union address.

"We passed some legislation last year, but it hasn't captured all the problems," Obama said during the Google+ Hangout, hosted on YouTube, in response to a question about what the government was doing to promote innovation -- and protect against what the questioner called "patent trolls."

"The folks that you're talking … Read more

The folks behind Pirate Bay are upset over a new Web site from antipiracy group CIAPC that looks just like their own site.

To kick off its latest antipiracy campaign, the Finland-based CIAPC (Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center) set up a new Web site urging people to find more legal means to download music, TV shows, and other digital content. To hammer home its point, the CIAPC site intentionally borrowed the exact design and style of the Pirate Bay site.

The group even duplicated the CSS stylesheet used by the Pirate Bay, ensuring that its site is a virtual duplicate, … Read more

An administrative law judge for the U.S. International Trade Commission has dismissed one of Nokia's nine patent infringement claims against HTC, patents blog Foss Patents reported today.

HTC argued that the patent, which deals with routing data to an app, is a standards-essential patent. ITC Administrative Law Judge Thomas B. Pender agreed, dismissing the one complaint.

Standards-essential patents are ones that companies must offer to other companies on a fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) basis. The idea is that fair licensing of intellectual property is needed for devices from different manufactures to work together properly. Most of the … Read more

State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

Middlesex County's district attorney had planned no jail time, "with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner," the report (alternate link) said. "Tragedy intervened when Ortiz's office took over the case to send 'a message.'"

The report … Read more