Take Youtube, change the language, fill it with even more competent hackers, and give it carte-blanche permission from the most powerful country in the world to infringe on whatever copyrights they want.  That will give you an idea of what the Chines video site Tudou is like.  Naturally, the site has been a major force in Chinese social media and in global media piracy.  There isn’t a TV/Movie link farm out there that doesn’t have half of its links ending up there; not to mention it’s the Youtube of the most populous nation in the world.  Well, they just joined forces with Chines search giant Soso to create a comprehensive video search engine for Tudou.  How does this effect people outside of China you ask?  Well, for starters, media piracy is about to get a lot more pervasive worldwide.

The case didn’t look to be a particularly big deal when it was going on, but Youtube just won a rather important precedent setting case in the realm of digital content and copyrights.  They were recently involved in a case with Viacom involving the procedures necessary to deal with copyright infringement in cyberspace.  The ruling in favor of Youtube means that, from this point on, it is going to be a good bit harder to get media taken down from the internet… or at least harder to make it legally necessary for someone else to have to.

Oh Apple, you rap-scallion.  We all know about your propensity for manipulating every little piece of legal documentation, ever so slightly in your favor until it all adds up to one giant monopolistic advantage.  But, there was some hope due to apples less maniacal behavior after their rise to #1.  Unfortunately, that fantasy was not long for this world because Apple’s new mobile advertising terms has just burst that bubble.  There is a slew of prohibitive terms that will severely reduce developers’ ad revenues in the name of maintaining Apple’s preeminence.

It hasn’t been an easy time for the FCC over the past few months, at least not where internet technology is concerned.  Not only have they lost the battle for net neutrality, but it seems as though that loss has lead to a bit of a spiral in which the FCC is in danger of losing their ability to have any authority over internet service at all.  In response to these unfortunate turn of events for the organization, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave an interview about the future of the FCC and internet service.

It has been said here before that while it is fun, easy, and useful to jailbreak your apple smartphone level products (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), it will never truly make its mark on the market.  The sorts of people who would be prone to jailbreaking just aren’t the same type of people who would typically be prone to buying a product that needs to be jailbroken in the first place.  This, however might not be the case for that much longer.

Between all the accusations of monopolistic practices, all the patent cases, and all the Facebook boycotts coming up, it seems that user freedom is finally taking the lead in our consciousnesses as tech consumers.  It seems appropriate that Richard Stallman, one of the minds behind the free software movement gave his thoughts on software, social networking, and computing freedom in an interview with Mashable.  For those of you who don’t know, the Free Software Foundation (symbolized by the adorable Yak) actually started before the Open Sourcers; they're basically the more militantly anti-proprietary older brother of Open Source.

As of March 4th, Dish Network has been made to pay over $400-million to Tivo in damages, in addition to having to cease all usage of their Tivo-like services that they were providing to Dish Network users.  This was an extreme blow to Dish, not only for the almost half-billion dollars paid initially, but because of all the lost research and development that was put into their real-time recording technology service.  Fortunately for the television provider, the US appeals court has allowed a turnover of the initial ruling, and a review of the case.  This is a rare accommodation, and it could be just the thing necessary to save Dish from a quick spiral into bankruptcy.

We all remember Steve Jobs’ personal blog post criticizing Adobe for their proprietary business practices surrounding Flash Player.  It was big for a day or two; we had a laugh at the grand hypocrisy of the whole issue, and then silently hoped that one of these evil giants would take down the other in their vie for monopolistic dominance.  Well, it seems that Adobe wasn’t content to just sit back and let everyone else’s “I told you so” make their argument for them.  Heck, they weren’t even content to leave the original argument remotely intact.  Adobe has officially issued their response in the form of a very strong marketing campaign, and they may come out smelling like roses this round.

In one of two ways, the Nokia vs. Apple case is representative of the end of modern tech patents.  On the one hand, this is a quintessential example of the frivolous patent infringement suits on the part of big tech companies that have been plaguing the industry  for years.  Everybody is always infringing on everybody's patents.  It’s a universal fact, but that means that everybody is always vulnerable to a major multi-million dollar lawsuit from any number of their competitors.  While they are being sued by Nokia, Apple is still suing HTC over their equally broad patents.

Nokia has decided to once again take Apple to court over patent infringement.  They’ve already done this before, but this time they are including the iPad into the mix of devices that infringe on their intellectual property.  The two big deal patents involved in this particular case that are likely to be the big players are: digitally enhanced speech and the use of GPS positioning data in apps.  Given that there hasn’t been a smartphone put out in the past five years that didn’t have apps using GPS data or digital speech, this could set up some dangerous legal momentum.

A handful of news companies have requested the documents supporting the search warrant in the criminal investigation for the missing iPhone prototype be released to the public. Initially the hearing was scheduled to be held on Thursday. As the San Mateo county judge did not give a proper response to the arguments of media lawyers, the hearing on the issue seems to be delayed for another week, says Los Angeles Times. However, in a statement as to why the documents remain locked said it’s “to protect the names of two individuals of interest in the investigation.” It was confirmed that the two people are not Apple employees.

At first glance the Second-life real estate case seems to be nothing more than a frivolous lawsuit initiated by people who care way too much about their MMOs, and it sort of is, but it is also an important case in that it has the opportunity to set some landmark precedents.    While it is certainly more concrete than it was a decade ago, the legal status of digital property is still a legal grey area.  Sure you can buy it, sell it, and own it (people do every day), but this case finally asks the question as to what exactly it is that you own when you buy digital property.  So what exactly IS digital property?

It finally happened.  Lo and behold, someone in Washington has the chutzpah to question Apple for their monopolistic business practices.   For now just an investigation (in all likelihood will never actually make it to trial) , but someone with authority finally pointed it out.  The crux of the investigation is Apple’s restrictions on developers making apps for the iPhone and iPad.  As of right now, they are required to use only Apple’s programming tools, which makes porting them to other platforms exceedingly difficult.

We’re all familiar with the old adage “invest in real estate, because they’re always making new people, but they’ll never make any more land.”  Well, old sayings just might need some updating for the digital age, because it seems that virtual real estate is becoming serious business.  How serious? Serious enough that a group of Second-Life users are actually in the middle of a real world lawsuit over virtual land.  Yes, ownership of the “land” that these particular users was actually valuable enough that it was worthwhile for them to take the company that created it to court over the issue. 

Google launched a new Government Request Tool on Tuesday. The tool informs the public of requests for user data or content removal that Google receives from World Governments. With Google receiving quite a large number of Government requests to remove content from their services, the data-list is getting exhaustive. As of now, the new tool features data from July to December 2009. Google plans to update the data in six-month increments. The company has done this to stay transparent with regard to legal requests.