Internet

A Virginia woman being sued by her home contractor for libel won't have to remove negative comments she posted on Internet review sites about him, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled.

The state’s high court reversed a Fairfax County Circuit Court judge’s ruling ordering Jane Perez to delete portions of her review of the contractor on Yelp and Angie’s List. In her review, Perez mentioned that her jewelry was missing. She also referenced the outcome of a suit brought by the contractor against Perez for nonpayment.

A man accused of throwing a severed horse head in a local politician's pool does not have to prove monetary loss to pursue a defamation lawsuit against his online accusers, an appellate court in New York ruled.

Paula Broadwell isn’t the only person whose Gmail messages were read by government officials – Google received almost 8,000 e-mail access requests from U.S. state and federal governments in the past six months, according to the latest Google Transparency Report.

Google fully or partially granted 90 percent of the requests made by federal, state and local U.S. governments, according to the report. The requests by stateside governments account for more than a third of requests worldwide.

An amendment to Kansas court rules now lets journalists use laptops and cell phones to report from the courtroom.

Reporters still need permission from the presiding judge, but the recent amendment to Rule 1001 clarifies that such devices may be used by journalists. Before the amendment was added, there was no mention of laptops or smartphones in the rule, and judges assumed such devices were not permitted, according to court spokesman Ron Keefover.

An Occupy Wall Street protester is challenging a court’s decision requiring his tweets to be handed over to New York prosecutors, arguing that his First and Fourth Amendment rights should apply to tweets like they would to information stored on a personal computer or phone.

Twitter complied today with a court order to hand over to New York prosecutors an Occupy Wall Street protester’s tweets and subscriber information.

After a state appellate court earlier this week denied Twitter's request to stay the proceedings, lawyers for the social networking company argued that disclosing an Occupy Wall Street protester's tweets and subscriber information would negatively affect those who use the social media service.

Media advocates are concerned about a federal court order that compels two technology companies involved in a drawn-out patent infringement lawsuit to disclose the names of writers they paid to comment about the case.

Google and Oracle, a computer technology corporation, have until Friday to identify any journalists or bloggers they paid for writing about the case, ruled Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

A social media website on which users have provided links to copyrighted videos from third-party servers has not itself violated copyright laws, a federal court ruled yesterday.

Although the case involves copyright claims for adult entertainment videos originally made by Flava Works, a gay pornography production company, the court’s ruling could also affect online news publishers that embed or link to other kinds of copied content.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., (4th Cir.) ordered a lower court yesterday to reconsider several of Rosetta Stone’s claims against Google over the search engine's use of trademarks in its web advertising platform.