legal

A federal court has ruled that warrantless cell phone tracking by police is legal.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit yesterday ruled (PDF) that law enforcement officials were within their legal right to track Melvin Skinner, an alleged drug trafficker, through his cell phone before his arrest in 2006. According to court documents, law enforcement officials were able to use the GPS feature on Skinner's cell phone to track his whereabouts and eventually arrest him.

According to the court, Skinner was convicted of two counts of drug trafficking and another of conspiracy to commit money … Read more

Hulu has found itself in some legal hot water over a law that was enacted long before its business model was even conceived.

According to The New York Times, Hulu has been hit with a lawsuit filed in a California federal court over claims that it violates the 1988 law, the Video Privacy Protection Act. The Times, which obtained the court documents, says unidentified plaintiffs have called on the law in their suit, charging Hulu with violating their privacy by allegedly sharing their viewing history with advertisers.

Though it's not often cited nowadays, the Video Privacy Protection Act was … Read more

Eastman Kodak failed to announce a winner for its patent bid yesterday, saying that the process is still "ongoing."

Kodak, which was supposed to announce the winners by 2 p.m. PT yesterday, said just minutes before the deadline that it was extending the time for its announcement. The company said that its creditors were onboard with the move, and indicated that all participants were still bound by a "court order on confidentiality."

"Kodak and its creditors have agreed to extend the timeline for announcing the outcome of the patent auction in light of continuing … Read more

Many high-profile Web sites in Malaysia are blacked out as part of a one-day protest against changes to a law that they say would restrict online freedom of speech.

Many home pages have been replaced with banners protesting the new amendment, dubbed "114A," to the Malaysian Evidence Act.

Revised in April, the Evidence Act 1950 was updated to include Section 114A, the "presumption of fact in publication," which critics claim would mean Web site administrators, Web hosting providers, Internet providers, and those who own a computer or mobile device "on which [content] was posted" … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Apple today said it plans to run through the rest of its major witnesses perhaps as soon as the end of the day, after which it will hand control of the case over to Samsung.

Apple's attorneys said in court this morning that they would get through another handful of its witnesses, picking up the pace from earlier in the week, when the company focused strongly on just a few design and marketing experts.

So far Apple has brought out two of its key executives, marketing chief Phil Schiller and iOS chief Scott Forstall, as … Read more

The Federal Trade Commission has jabbed Google with a hefty fine over its alleged Safari tracking practices.

The government agency today announced that Google has agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle the FTC's charges that Google "placed an advertising tracking cookie on the computers of Safari users who visited sites within Google's DoubleClick advertising network." The issue, the FTC said, is that Google had assured those users that they would be automatically opted out of the tracking because of Safari's handling of third-party cookies.

The FTC's fine is the largest ever for … Read more

Research In Motion has succeeded in getting overturned a verdict that would have forced it to pay $147.2 million in patent-infringement damages to mobile device management company Mformation.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has overturned a trial verdict and granted RIM's "motion for judgment as a matter of law." According to RIM, the court found that the evidence in the case did not adequately support the jury's verdict.

"We appreciate the judge's careful consideration of this case. RIM did not infringe on Mformation's patent and we … Read more

Apple is pointing to an internal Samsung document highlighting the weaknesses of the Galaxy S1 compared with the iPhone as further evidence that Samsung has copied its work.

The document, a "relative evaluation report" on the Galaxy S1 and iPhone published in March 2010 and unearthed by Apple, highlights where Samsung's flagship phone fell short of the iPhone. The report looked at several different features, from the call screen to the browsing experience and even the difference in the calculator.

Apple will draw on this document as proof that Samsung actively compared its products against the iPhone, … Read more

Tuesday's top tech stories are out to disrupt your world:

Oh Amazon, what don't you do? Well cross off game development, as it just launched its own studio to make Facebook games and compete with Zynga. It also joined the textbook rental service to face off with eBay's Half.com and BookRenter.

YouTube will no longer be a pre-loaded default app on Apple devices. Apple is dropping the YouTube app for iOS 6, and Google will create a separate app you can download. It's all part of Apple's mission to distance itself from Google.

If … Read more