MySpace Is Said to Draw Subpoena in Hoax Case
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The subpoena is in connection with the suicide of a 13-year-old Missouri girl after she received cruel messages from people posing as a teenage boy on the site.
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How to hand over the details MySpace this week asked a Pennsylvania state court for advice on how it could hand over information about registered sex offenders without breaking US data protection and privacy laws.â¦
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New York State Attorney General Andrew  Cuomo said on Monday his office has subpoenaed Facebook,  accusing the social networking site of not keeping young users  safe from sexual predators and not responding to user  complaints.
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(InfoWorld) - Facebook's safety controls and procedures are deficient and fail to properly protect minors from adult sexual predators in the company's social-networking site, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo charged Monday. Cuomo's office has sent Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter detailing preliminary findings of an investigation into Facebook's safety measures and requesting via a subpoena a series of company documents. The subpoena calls for Facebook to submit complaints it has received regarding inappropriate solicitation of underage users and inappropriate content on the site as well as any responses generated by the company. Facebook also has to produce all of its policies "on user safety and all representations made to consumers about the safety of the site," the attorney general's office said in a statement. Early results of the ongoing investigation reveal that the description of Facebook's safety measures is far from reality. In recent weeks, investigators from Cuomo's office posing on the site as minors have been repeatedly solicited by adult predators. The investigators were also able to access a wide range of pornographic images and videos. To add insult to injury, Facebook either didn't respond or responded slowly to complaints from the investigators posing as either harrassed minors or their parents, according to Cuomo's office. Facebook reacted in similar ways to complaints about inappropriate images displayed on the site. Overall, Cuomo takes issue with Facebook's assertion that its social-networking site is safe and suggests that Facebook may be in violation of New York laws for misleading public statements and advertising. Facebook said in a statement that it takes the concerns of Cuomo's office "very seriously" and that it is committed to working closely with all state attorneys general on safety matters. "As our service continues to grow so does our responsibility to our users to empower them with the tools necessary to communicate efficiently and safely. We strive to uphold our high standards for privacy on Facebook and are constantly working on processes and technologies that will further improve safety and user control on the site," the company said. U.S. state attorneys general are turning up the heat on Facebook, MySpace, and online social networks in general, concerned that sexual predators are using these sites to stalk and victimize minors while site operators do little to prevent this from happening. In May, News Corp.'sÂ MySpace agreed to provide attorneys general offices in all U.S. states with information it has gathered on convicted sex offenders who have used its social networking site. The decision followed a tussle between MySpace and the AG offices, several of which had complained MySpace had resisted sharing sex offender data with them.
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Federal prosecutors in New York have issued a subpoena to the New York Times, the city&#39;s biggest daily newspaper, in an investigation of how newspapers measure circulation figures for advertisers.
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A handful of prominent individuals have been caught creating fake online identities to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for themselves or their companies.
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ruling last week ordering a reporter for Time magazine to jail for contempt and a subpoena later issued to a reporter for The New York Times in the same case are the latest examples in what legal experts characterize as an ominous ...
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By Laura Petrecca  The conventional wisdom is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But in the digital age, that's often not the case for high-profile professionals being targeted on MySpace.com.
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Barnes & Noble Inc. has received a subpoena from a U.S. attorney requesting documents on its stock options practices.
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Federal prosecutors are demanding that the American Civil Liberties Union turn over all copies of a secret document it has obtained, in what is apparently the first time a criminal grand jury subpoena has been used in an attempt to seize leaked material, the ACLU and legal experts said yesterday.
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Questions social networker's commitment to protecting underage users Facebook officials have been subpoenaed by New York's top law enforcement official after a preliminary review revealed "significant defects in the site's safety controls" designed to shield underage users from sexual predators.â¦
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Facebook is suing seventeen people and a Canadian Internet porn company for allegedly trying to mine the popular social networking site for its users&#39; personal details.Facebook alleges that in June servers controlled by the defendants used automated scripts to make more than 200,000 requests for personal information stored on Facebook&#39;s site. The allegations are contained in an amended lawsuit filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California.The company first filed suit back in June, but amended the complaint this month after obtaining court orders to identify who controlled the servers trying to access its site.Experts have warned people against publishing too much personal information on social networking sites for fear it could be collected and then abused by fraudsters.Facebook, one of the most-used social networking sites after MySpace, said the automated scripts caused error messages to be generated, but the company did not say if user information was successfully collected.Named in the suit is Istra Holdings, which controls SlickCash.com, an affiliate advertising business that offers commissions to Web publishers for referring Internet surfers to its portfolio of adult sites.It also names Brian Fabian and Josh Raskin, both of whom the suit says work at Istra in Toronto, and Ming Wu of Markham, Ontario, as well as 14 other unidentified people.Facebook said the hacking attempts cost it at least US$5,000 to investigate. The company has requested a jury trial and is seeking to bar the defendants from accessing its computer systems in the future, in addition to damages.&#160;
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Two New York teenagers were in police custody Wednesday facing illegal computer access and attempted extortion charges after they allegedly threatened to shake down the popular Web site MySpace.com unless its operators paid them &#36;150,000, prosecutors said.
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By David Ovalle, The Miami Herald  Mar. 5--Hey, MySpace users: Miami-Dade police want to be your friend.   The county's largest police department has created its own page on the social networking site Myspace.com.
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Prosecutors want to know whether the business development company obtained the phone records of a critic through impersonation.
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Universal Music Group's recently filed lawsuit against MySpace.com has been generating some Internet speculation about the underlying reasons prompting the behemoth music publisher to go after the social-networking site.
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(InfoWorld) - Legal experts are split in their evaluation of Google's defense strategy in two copyright-infringement lawsuits, particularly regarding the company's arm-twisting attempts to extract confidential information from uninvolved competitors. Some view Google's tactics as aggressive, unusual and ultimately ineffective, while others see them as part of a fairly standard defense in copyright litigation. Google sent subpoenas to Amazon.com, Yahoo and Microsoft demanding they provide it with information about their book-scanning activities, a move that raised eyebrows because those companies are among its biggest rivals. Google plans to use this information in its defense in two lawsuits filed last year. The suits allege that Google's massive project to scan, make searchable and store digital copies of millions of copyrighted library books without permission from the copyright owner is illegal. Google is also scanning books in the public domain. Google argues that its scanning is protected under the fair use principle, which allows for limited use of copyright material, because it only displays text snippets of copyrighted books' content in response to queries in its Book Search service. That overall argument, along with the subpoena tactic, demonstrates Google is willing to mount an atypical and pugnacious defense, said Lee Bromberg, a partner at Bromberg & Sunstein LLP, a firm that specializes in intellectual property litigation. "This [subpoena action] isn't par for the course at all in this type of case," he said. With the subpoenas, Google is trying to argue that if its competitors are scanning books, it follows that Google is acting legally, according to Bromberg. "But I don't think it's evidence of that at all, and I think it's out of line for Google to do this," Bromberg said. This type of subpoena is usually used to get evidence from an uninvolved third party that may have relevant information about the litigation. For example, it would make sense for Google to subpoena information from one of its business partners, or from a partner of one of the plaintiffs, Bromberg said. "Those partners might possess documents that could be relevant to sorting out the issues between Google and the plaintiff publishers here. But that doesn't seem to be the case," Bromberg said. Wendy Seltzer, a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and an expert on Internet law and intellectual property, said the subpoenas might be part of a more conventional defense, in which Google will try to prove that book-scanning isn't hurting copyright owners nor the publishing market. Google's ultimate goal will be to have the court say its activities are protected by the fair use principle, which allows for limited use of copyright material, she said. Already Yahoo and Amazon.com have refused to comply with the subpoenas and have indicated in court filings that they are determined to stand their ground against what they consider an inappropriate and overreaching request from Google. Microsoft declined to comment when asked how it has responded or plans to respond to the subpoena. What's clear is that the subpoena standoff could further complicate and lengthen an already complex case that, barring an unexpected settlement, could drag on for years. After the refusals from Yahoo and Amazon.com, the ball is in Google's court. Google has the option to file a motion with the court to compel its two rivals to comply with the subpoena request. If the court were to grant that motion to compel, Amazon.com and Yahoo would probably have a choice to escalate the matter to an appeals court. "That [the subpoena clash] in itself can become a protracted battle," said Sheldon Klein, an attorney specializing in intellectual property and a partner at Arent Fox PLLC in Washington, D.C. Google declined to answer specific questions, providing only a prepared statement via e-mail that characterized the subpoena and objection process as "a common part of ongoing litigation." It intends to speak with Yahoo and Amazon.com over their concerns, Google said. Amazon.com declined to comment on whether it is holding talks with Google, but Yahoo doesn't foresee much chance of arriving at some middle ground. "Google will quickly learn we're not interested in some lesser compromise position. Our position is that we're not going to produce documents in response to the subpoena," said Reggie Davis, who is associate general counsel at Yahoo and manages litigation for the company. Like Bromberg, Davis finds Google's subpoena action surprising and aggressive, in large part because Yahoo doesn't even have its own book-scanning project. Its activities in this area are limited to its participation in a collective effort known as the Open Content Alliance, which doesn't scan copyrighted books without permission from the copyright owner. "It seems to us that their approach is completely different from ours, so we're surprised they'd want to get information from us about our approach, which is to get permission before copying. And it seems to us to be completely irrelevant and not particularly helpful to Google's argument or justification for their approach," Davis said. The plaintiffs in the Book Search cases -- the Association of American Publishers (AAP), acting on behalf of five of its members, and the Authors Guild Inc. and three authors -- aren't the only ones questioning the copyright legality of a Google search service. Others are suing Google in the U.S. and abroad for similar reasons over its news, image and video search engines.