U.S. Court of Appeals

Comcast fired back at the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday in its long-running duel with the agency. The cable-TV and Internet service provider filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

The filing is the result of a FCC hearing last month in which Comcast was sanctioned for throttling back the broadband speed of customers using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing application. The FCC ordered Comcast to provide plans for equitably managing its bandwidth and to make its network-management policies public.

Comcast's View

Commercial software developers, listen up: If you think open source is a free toolkit from which you can borrow at will, take a good look at Wednesday's legal ruling. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in New York City, where many intellectual-property cases are heard, overturned a Northern California court decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer, a pivotal case in open-source and Creative Commons law.

The bottom line? Even if open-source or Creative Commons licensing agreements charge no cash, if you violate terms of the license you are infringing on copyrighted material.

Commercial software developers, listen up: If you think open source is a free toolkit from which you can borrow at will, look a good look at Wednesday's legal ruling. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in New York City, where many intellectual-property cases are heard, overturned a Northern California court decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer, a pivotal case in open-source and Creative Commons law.

The bottom line? Even if open-source or Creative Commons licensing agreements charge no cash, if you violate terms of the license you are infringing on copyrighted material.

A U.S. appeals court on Monday ruled that Cablevision's DVR service does not infringe on the rights of content holders.

"We do not believe that an RS-DVR customer is sufficiently distinguishable from a VCR user to impose liability as a direct infringer on a different party for copies that are made automatically upon that customer's command," according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Cablevision's RS-DVR Paradigm

In a ruling the American Civil Liberties Union is calling a clear victory for free speech, a federal court on Tuesday once again upheld a ban on a law that would criminalize constitutionally protected speech on the Internet.

The ACLU challenged the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) as unconstitutional on behalf of a broad coalition of writers, artists and health educators who use the Internet to communicate constitutionally protected speech.

More than a year after they were introduced, federal rules intended to keep cell phone towers operating during natural disasters remain in limbo.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday put off deciding on the wireless industry's challenge to the regulations until the Federal Communications Commission gets preliminary clearance for the rules.